A hundred acres of liquid asphalt, 250 feet deep in the middle, holding an estimated ten million tons of bitumen, which makes it the largest natural deposit of the stuff on the planet. Walter Raleigh found it on his 1595 voyage and immediately used it to caulk his ships, noting that it does not melt in the sun the way Norwegian pitch does. The surface is firm enough to walk on with a guide, and it is slowly swallowing and preserving things: indigenous artefacts and human remains have come out of it. The local story is that the lake opened as a punishment after ancestors cooked and ate a sacred hummingbird. It is still a working mine, run by Lake Asphalt of Trinidad and Tobago, and there is a museum. La Brea, southwest Trinidad.
La Brea, Trinidad and Tobago
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