About 18 km to the west of Varna, Bulgaria, on the road to the capital of Sofia is a remarkable natural area called Pobiti Kamani or the Stone Forest. At first glance, it looks like the ruins of an ancient temple, but these broken stone pillars are all natural.

The stone columns are distributed in small groups across an 8 km long belt along the northern Bulgarian Black Sea coast. They vary in height with some reaching 5 to 7 meters tall, and thickness ranging from 30 centimeters to 3 meters across. The most curious thing about these pillars is that they are mostly hollow and filled with sand. They don’t have a solid foundation or attached to the bedrock. Instead, they are loosely stuck into the surrounding sand as if some one had hammered them into the earth.

Photo credit: Diego Delso/Wikimedia