Sea or bay
Promontorium Pyreneum
Cap de Creus
Listen to the story
Two slanting words written in black out in the sea, beside a peninsula jutting from the coast, are all that remain of Promontorium Pyreneum, the headland where the Pyrenees reach the Mediterranean, today Cap de Creus in Catalonia. The Roman writers Pliny and Livy both knew it by that name. On the map itself the ink has faded badly. The printed editions of 1598 and 1753 still read the Pyrenean headland, but today only a few letters survive, and scholars now doubt the reading, since a legible r followed by an a hardly fits the word for headland.