Episode Details

Michael Donnellan is the producer and director of Atlantica - a three-season documentary series ten years in the making, currently in a distribution bidding war, with Sky History Channel filming an episode at the site in June. George Howard, who attended the Cosmic Summit premiere of the first episode, has been sitting on the story for nearly a year while the rest of the world waits. This conversation is a wide-ranging update on everything that has happened since.

The case for Cadiz as the location of Atlantis's capital city begins with Plato himself. The Timaeus and Critias name the area of Gadis - modern Cadiz - as the location of the capital. Michael notes that in Plato's time this was not an obscure reference. The Greeks had already colonised the coastline, founded the city of Portus Menesthei at what is now El Puerto de Santa Maria, and vacationed in the region regularly. Saying Atlantis was near Cadiz in 360 BC was the equivalent of saying it was near New York. Everyone would have known exactly where you meant. What Michael and his team have spent a decade documenting is the physical evidence: structures visible only at low tide along the coastlines of Sanlucar de Barrameda and the surrounding area, older foundations beneath the famous Phoenician fishing corrals, a submerged city 3.5 kilometres offshore at 20 metres depth, and a rocky outcrop visible from the cathedral whose Arabic name - Sal Medina, meaning the lost city - tells you that even a thousand years ago local people knew something had once been there. The February 2025 storms stripped sand from a clay sediment layer that had not been exposed in thousands of years, revealing cut marks resembling those found in Malta and, crucially, elephant bones from the Upper Palaeolithic period - physical confirmation that the elephants Plato explicitly mentions as part of the Atlantean economy were genuinely present in this region at the relevant time.

The Tartessos - the mysterious pre-Phoenician Iberian culture whose origins could extend back six to seven thousand years, whose script remains undeciphered, and who possessed written laws that Greek historian Strabo dated 6,000 years before his own time - are Michael's candidates for the post-catastrophe survivors of the Atlantean civilisation. Their naval expertise, metallurgy, and trading networks mirror the Atlantean characteristics Plato describes precisely. The Younger Dryas catastrophe, which Michael personally favours as a cosmic impact event, would have driven coastal survivors into the caves now found throughout the mountains of Andalusia - caves that show evidence of human habitation across 35,000 years, including prehistoric paintings of industrial-scale fishing fleets pursuing orca. The megalithic culture that subsequently emerged - concentrated more heavily in southwestern Iberia than anywhere else in Europe, with the oldest dolmens in the world among its remnants - represents, in Michael's reading, the engineering knowledge of a pre-catastrophe civilisation reasserting itself through the hands of people who remembered what their ancestors had built.

The episode also covers the archives of the Palace of Medina Sidonia, which Michael was finally granted access to two months before this recording. The last Duchess wrote extensively on the evidence that Columbus was not the first European to cross the Atlantic - knowledge preserved in one of the oldest private archives in Europe, held by a family whose name encodes the Arabic words for city of Sidon, and whose position controlling the trade routes in and out of the Mediterranean placed them at the centre of the pre-Columbian Atlantic knowledge network. In the third season, Michael says, he will prove it. The conversation also touches on the second Sphinx debate, the Egyptian priests of Sais who told Solon that both Greeks and Egyptians were descended from the Atlantean civilisation, and the straightforward strategic logic o