Beautiful Places - Underwater Ruins

The ever-cheerful Plato offers up this account of the end of the lost continent of Atlantis, which had just lost a war with the intent of extending its empire:

But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.

Parable or history?  Most serious scholars think the former, but there is not enough evidence to completely dismiss the latter.  Many people over centuries have searched for the sunken land and its fabled city, and no end of legends have sprung up around it.  But while Atlantis, if it existed at all, remains hidden from view, many other underwater ruins and shipwrecks are well known, and offer up beautiful images to the eye:

Some the architecture that gives the city its name

According to the U.K. 's Daily Mail, Shi Cheng was known as the Lion City until 1959 when the Chinese government decided this area was a perfect spot for a hydroelectric plant, which needed a man-made lake to support it.  Now Lake Qiandao surrounds it, and divers need to go 131 feet down to see the preserved architecture:

Quiet and beautiful

Pavlopetri in Greece

Heracleion, Cleopatra's recently discovered port city in the Mediterranean 

A nice list a summary can be found here. These underwater ruins have an almost magnetic attraction because of what they were, are, and say about humans and our march through time.  Constructed to be testaments to human power, ingenuity, and dominance over the natural world, these ruins once sat on solid ground for all to see and ponder.  Now, through fortune or design, these terrestrial spaces and now transported to an alien world.  Here, we see something familiar but in an altogether unfamiliar context.  There's a solitude now to these constructions that once teemed with human activity.  Quiet, remote, strange-yet-familiar, these ruins remind us that the plans and designs we make in this world are really only for the moment - thoughts of longevity are nothing more than beautiful daydreams concocted on a summer's afternoon.