From Dracula’s castle to coral reefs, experience world culture with this global webcam tour
1. Dracula’s Castle - Castelul Bran, Romania
In Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, there is a ‘wild and uncanny place’ - a castle in the Carpathian mountains of Transylvania built ‘on the very edge of a terrible precipice’.
Finding himself a prisoner in this castle, one of the book’s narrators, Jonathan Harker, describes ‘broken battlements’ showing ‘a jagged line against the moonlit sky’ and ‘tall black windows’ from which ‘came no ray of light’.
He writes in his journal that:
To the west was a great valley, and then, rising far away, great jagged mountain fastnesses, rising peak on peak, the sheer rock studded with mountain ash and thorn, whose roots clung in cracks and crevices and crannies of the stone.
Bram Stoker never visited Romania but the detailed descriptions of Dracula’s Castle have given rise to the opinion that it must be based on a real castle - Castelul Bran. It is the only castle in Romania that matches Stoker’s description.
Is it foreboding and wild? Or majestic and serene? That depends on your viewpoint, and perhaps on the weather. Take a look at Castelul Bran’s webcam and see how it makes you feel today.
Dare to discover Dracula's Castle cam?
2. A coral reef in Karlsruhe, Germany
There are many reasons to love coral. It acts as a buffer to protect shorelines from the worst of the ocean’s attacks. It is home to incredible and valuable ecosystems with mind-blowing levels of biodiversity which benefit local communities by driving tourism. And it even has medicinal qualities - scientists are looking to coral reef animals and plants for cures to human diseases like cancer.
But human activity is also destroying reefs through pollution and climate change, fishing and harvesting of coral for building materials. It takes hundreds of thousands of years for a single coral larvae to turn into the kind of structure we see today in coral barrier reefs and atolls. Yet more than half of our coral reefs have been lost since the 1950s.
With this webcam, you can meet Karla, the Blacktip Reef Shark as she swims around Germany’s largest living coral reef at the State Museum of Natural History in Karlsruhe. Sometimes, you can also catch divers in the tank, making it clean and safe for its inhabitants.
Watch the fish and divers at the State Museum of Natural History
3. Clifftop views at The Minack Theatre, Cornwall, UK
Set on a clifftop 27 metres above the sea, the dramatic open air Minack Theatre is the result of the vision and hard work of Rowena Cade who built it almost single-handedly in the 1930s. Minack means ‘a rocky place’ and Rowena bought this rocky place for £100 in the early 1920s and built her home, Minack House, there.
After offering the use of her garden for an open air performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Rowena had to create a stage area and somewhere for the audience to sit. And so she started digging and cutting rocks to create terraces, and later, carving complex designs into wet concrete. Now, the theatre stages over 200 performances a year. Its webcam provides the exact same view as the photograph we've featured here!
4. Serenity at the gardens of the Adachi Museum, Yasugi, Japan
Japanese garden design is based on Buddhist, Shinto and Taoist philosophies inspiring calm and peaceful contemplation. The Adachi Museum of Art, Yasugi, Japan, is home to gardens designed as a ‘living Japanese painting’ in line with the belief of the museum’s founder, Adachi Zenko, that ‘the garden is also a picture’.
If you’re in Europe, you’ll need to check this one early in the day - the Adachi Museum of Art is seven hours ahead of Central European Time. So perhaps take a look with your morning coffee, take a moment to breathe calmly and set your intentions for the day.
5. Restoration of a Flying Fortress in Ohio, USA
Watch the webcam from the Champaign Aviation Museum in Ohio, USA, and you can step inside a hangar and see a Boeing B-17G ‘Flying Fortress’ being restored. This type of aircraft was developed as a bomber for the United States Army Air Corps and dates from the 1930s. It dropped more bombs than any other type of aircraft in World War II.
The B-17G at the Champaign Aviation Museum, nicknamed ‘Champaign Lady’, was manufactured in 1945 and is being rebuilt using parts from other airframes. When replacement parts are not available, a team of volunteers makes them using original drawings as reference.
If you’re in Europe, check this one in the afternoon or evening, Ohio is six hours behind Central European Time.
6. Cutting-edge design at the Vitra Design Museum, Germany
The Vitra Design Museum is in Weil am Rhein in Germany, just across the border from Basel, Switzerland. It was founded in 1989 to display a private furniture collection.
Over time, it has produced small exclusive exhibitions, internationally acclaimed exhibitions and travelling exhibitions, as well as establishing an independent publishing house and its own product lines. Amongst its 7,000 items of furniture is a collection of truly iconic chairs.
The buildings at the Vitra Design Museum are definitely worth a look in their own right. Since the 1980s, the Vitra company has erected buildings with structures by international architects such as Herzog & de Meuron, Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, Frank Gehry, Nicholas Grimshaw, SANAA, Álvaro Siza and others.
The webcam gives a view over the South entrance of the Vitra Campus. Inside the buildings you see in the webcam are amazing collections of design objects (in the Schaudepot designed by Herzog & de Meuron) and sharp-edged, high-ceilinged exhibition spaces (in the Fire Station designed by Zaha Hadid).
Take in the brick-red terrace of the Vitra Schaudepot and the functional concrete Fire Station
7. Elk-spotting at the National Museum of Wildlife Art, Wyoming, USA
Do you know your elk from your moose or wapiti?
The North American elk (Cervus candensis) - also known as wapiti - is one of the largest members of the deer family. They can grow to stand 1.5m tall at the shoulder and weigh up to 540 kg. But the Eurasian elk (Alces alces) - also known as moose - is bigger. The record breaker was a moose killed in Yukon in 1897, with a shoulder height of 2.3m and weight of 366 kg.
At the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Wyoming, USA, which houses more than 5,000 artworks of wild animals around the world, you can look for elk (wapiti) as well as coyotes, hawks, foxes and even wolves with its webcam that overlooks the National Elk Refuge.
If you’re in Europe, check this one in the afternoon or evening, Wyoming is eight hours behind Central European Time.