I am going to let Idiens and TDW arm wrestle to see who posts the next photo. Neither got it fully, but it's a poor photo and I have to sign off for a long while and don't want to leave the thread hanging:
Ciutadella, Menorca, Balaeric Islands, Spain. A lovely town to visit.
Ciutadella generally plays second fiddle to famous Mahon on Menorca, but it is a beautiful spot in its own right. The harbour is a long, narrow cala (spanish calas, and french calanques, are much like a mini-fiord). Besides its obvious aesthetic virtues, this harbour is notorious for an extremely rare phenomenom called a "Rissaga wave". Also known as a meteorological gravity wave, the Rissaga wave is very similar to a tsunami wave, except it is not seismically generated. Instead, it is caused by a confluence of unusual oceanographic topography and extreme barometric fluctuations.
Read about a recent Rissaga event here:
www.adv-geosci.net/12/1/2007/adgeo-12-1-2007.pdf
The phenomena was first explained to me by a visiting spanish sailor who was anchored adjacent to us. He described a Rissaga event that had occurred a few years earlier, in the late '80s. I understand that since then, several more have occurred, including one around 1997 as well as the event described in the link above. I did not sleep well that night knowing how close were tied stern to:
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