“Red is rare in the landscape. It gains its strength through its absence.” — Chroma, Derek Jarman

I follow a winding, overgrown track down into a valley in southwestern Spain. There’s no sign of other walkers, but the landscape is teeming with life — spring flowers in bloom, butterflies and bees darting across my path. Looking toward the valley below, I catch a shock of red through the foliage and know I’m heading in the right direction. The sight I finally reach seems at first like an illusion: a river with water of deep red hues, with its shallows pooling in shades of sour yellow and burnt orange.

Taken out of context, this surreal landscape could be a view of another planet or a toxic wasteland. The colours signal caution; my senses instinctively register them as unsafe. The highly acidic, iron-rich water of the river is inhospitable to most plant and animal life, caused by acidic runoff from rich sulfur ore deposits in the ground and exacerbated by the area’s long legacy of opencast mining. Despite its harshness, this extreme environment is one of the few places on Earth being studied by astrobiologists as a breeding ground for unfamiliar forms of life. Rare sulphide-consuming bacteria and other extremophile microorganisms thrive here, just as they do in the volcanic craters of Dallol in Ethiopia, offering possible clues to life beyond our planet. If life can adapt to these conditions, it might also be able to survive in the gassy atmosphere of Jupiter or around the sulphur rocks discovered on Mars.

After days of exploring the river, I found myself chasing colour as though it were a fading, temporary phenomenon, but the jolts of red never lost their intensity. Looking at the scarlet surfaces and maroon depths through my camera, I tried to imagine something beyond — abstract shapes and shifting patterns, like glimpses of distant galaxies or planetary surfaces hinting at another world not yet discovered.


For Atmos Volume 10: Afterlife, January 2025