Lost Rivers Map: 23 Maps of Underground Rivers and Buried Streams

Rivers that cities have buried are mapped by people who walk with their heads down. One Londoner ranks drain grates by what can be heard through them, another counts 40 plaques set into the pavement above the Effra; a Nagoya researcher maps 1,630 ditches, streams and canals and notes which are still open, covered or filled in, and someone in Sheffield has drawn 984 lines without a single word. Between them are students in Buenos Aires writing poems over piped streams, a Toronto walker naming brooks after the churches and mosques above them, and a database of 117 cities that dug their rivers back up.

1. River Fleet Map: Where to Hear London's Buried River

   “Be amazed as from all the market shoppers and traders, no-one bats an eye-lid as you crouch down with your ear to the grid.” This survey of the River Fleet rates grates and manholes from Hampstead Heath to Blackfriars by what they give away: “Excellent sound & vision”, “Sound only, and you’ll have to keep your ear close to ground”, or, on Royal College Street, “Nothing to see or hear, but a good Fleety whiff can be had here.” Bazalgette’s high, middle and low level intercepting sewers are drawn in, and their roar is marked too. The only place the river is above ground after the Heath is a big iron pipe over the railway; the Goodison Fountain offers its iron-rich water, with the warning “it made me sick. All in the name of Fleet research!” At New Bridge Street the author bids the river farewell before “its kidnapping by Bazalgette’s lower interceptor”.

   

   Objects

   9688 points, 8 lines

   Countries

   United Kingdom

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   Google My Maps

2. Nagoya Buried Streams Map: 1,630 Lost Waterways

   Line after line in this map of 1,630 waterways carries a verdict: 現存/暗渠 (still there, covered), 現存/開渠 (still there, open) or 埋め立て (filled in). The map sorts Nagoya’s water into irrigation channels, natural streams and drainage, and canals, and where a branch had no known name the author gives it one and marks it (仮), provisional. The Goyōsui, which fed the moat of Nagoya Castle, is filled in and now a strip of park; one channel survives only as a crooked district boundary; another passes beneath a weir by siphon. Names are footnoted to land-readjustment plans and page 66 of the Nakagawa ward history, and one entry cannot hide its delight: “there’s a ladder-type open channel too!”

   

   Objects

   1,6301,534 lines, 96 areas

   Countries

   Japan

   Made with

   Google My Maps

3. River Effra Map: 40 Plaques Over a Buried River

   “I walked past this plaque dozens of times before noticing it.” Small plaques in the pavement mark the course of the River Effra, and this map finds 40 of them from Crown Dale in Norwood to Lawn Lane near the Thames, six in a row outside Brixton Police Station. The author learns to read the streets: the north-south roads around Tulse Hill all dip where the Effra crossed them, and on Norwood Park Road the dip led to a plaque “almost under a parked car”, where a cat came over to offer congratulations. Through a grating on Hexham Road “constantly rushing water” can be heard; one stinkpipe is signed by Frederick Bird and co of Regent Street; one plaque has vanished and survives only on Street View from 2018. Where the plaques stop the note reads: “Maybe because this is the Borough of Southwark rather than Lambeth? Will enquire.”

   

   Objects

   6557 points, 8 lines

   Countries

   United Kingdom

   Made with

   Google My Maps

4. Hartford Park River Map: Cover It, Park Cars on It

   Letter after letter to the Hartford Courant wanted the Park River covered so cars could park on it. In 1927 a reader signing only with his initials asked for the river through Bushnell Park to be “given over for the parking of cars”, in 1930 another wanted it covered from Main to Hudson Street, and in 1932 one predicted it “will some day have to be roofed over from the railroad station to Front Street”. This map of Hartford’s buried river pins such clippings where they happened, beside the 1940 conduit contract that promised “a freer flow of automobile traffic”, the 1922 street department driver who dumped snow into the river and went in after it with his horses, and a canoe trip through the tunnel in 2012. Along the branches still open it marks the paths down to the water (“Expect to get muddy”), pawpaw, wild strawberries and black raspberries, and where coyotes and bobcats have been seen.

   

   Objects

   375375 points

   Countries

   United States

   Made with

   Google My Maps

5. Buenos Aires Underground Streams Map: Invisible Waters

   “El agua corre bajo la ciudad, atrapada en tubos”: the water runs under the city, trapped in pipes, still pushing up from below. A university studio signing as TallerT mapped the piped streams of Buenos Aires, the Maldonado, Medrano, Vega, White and the rest, as watershed polygons, each handed to a student group, then let the students pin short texts and photos to places where water still shows. The old city’s streams, once called Los Terceros, are traced to their present run under Garay and México, Perón and Marcelo T. de Alvear; an empty lake becomes “a mirror of water and sky” in which absences are reflected; a puddle claims it fell from the sky in the May Revolution. The studio made several more maps of the same streams, among them the walks its students took along them.

   

   Objects

   1,121477 points, 630 lines, 14 areas

   Countries

   ArgentinaBrazil

   Made with

   OpenStreetMap uMap

   Versions

   1 other version

6. Stream Daylighting Map: 117 Buried Rivers Dug Back Up

   Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon, opened in 2008, cost US$380,000,000 for 5,800 metres of uncovered stream; Strawberry Creek in Berkeley cost $50,000 in 1984 and is noted as an “early model for daylighting; completed with limited budget”. This map records the reverse of burial: 117 projects that brought culverted streams back to the surface, each with city, completion date, length and cost, sorted into naturalized and channelized. Zürich appears again and again, with brooks such as the Albisrieder Dorfbach, 2,500 metres opened in 1991. A tributary of Shoal Creek in Georgia was opened for $14,500, “less costly than maintaining culvert”; Jenkins Creek in Maple Valley, Washington, was daylighted out from under a golf course and a parking lot; Toronto’s Garrison Creek is marked “Symbolic”.

   

   Objects

   117117 points

   Countries

   United StatesSwitzerlandUnited Kingdomand 5 more

   Made with

   Google My Maps

7. Toronto Lost Creeks Map: Ashbridge's Bay and the Beaches

   Most streams that drained to Ashbridge’s Bay never had names, so this map gives them some and says why. Mayim Creek, Hebrew for water, passes three old Jewish cemeteries; the Siena-Madina Stream is named for St. Catharine of Siena Church and the Madinah Masjid on the Danforth. The courses come from the 1884 plan of survey, Goad’s atlas of 1913 and the 1909 militia topographic map, and where the maps fail, from the ground: an asphalt-covered bank in a school yard, a bend in Boultbee Avenue, slight dips in laneways. A man named Bill Lewis remembers canoeing around 1940 on a stream that began in a marsh, and the street name Millbrook is dismissed as “a real estate developer’s conceit”. Underneath it all lies the shore cliff of glacial Lake Iroquois, formed some 13,500 years ago.

   

   Objects

   5542 lines, 13 areas

   Countries

   Canada

   Made with

   Google My Maps

8. Tokyo Underground Rivers Map: Green Roads Over Covered Streams

   Tokyo paved many of its rivers into green roads, and this bilingual map of 1,203 objects numbers them like a catalogue: “(28) Shibuya River / Shibuyagawa 渋谷川 / Cat Street”, “(19) Jakuzure River green road 蛇崩川緑道 (Shibuya Aqueduct per 1945 map)”, “(27) へび道 Snake Road”, the winding lane of Yanaka that was once a stream. Paths cite their sources, city park leaflets, blogs, old maps, and tags whether any water is left: “(visible water)”, “(little visible water)”, “(not green)”. Polygons say only “Was water” or “Used to be water”. It is a work in progress, with layers named “ON LOAN - to be moved” and “to be validated” and entries such as “CHECK NAME xxx Placeholder”.

   

   Objects

   1,203707 points, 451 lines, 45 areas

   Countries

   Japan

   Made with

   Google My Maps

9. San Germán Sewer Tunnel Map: A Creek Under Brick Vaults

   The Quebrada Manzanares runs through San Germán in a brick vault, and this map walks it underground sheet by sheet. Thirty drawings date each section: the vault under Calle Luna around 1851, the one under Calle Carro in 1853, 115 inches high and showing a dangerous crack, a stretch built between about 1895 and 1910 by the contractor Francisco Lagarde, a 12-metre section by the Puerto Rico railway company. Differences in size suggest three segments were built by different contractors; under the old Farmacia Cooperativa the tunnel widens to 122 inches. The concrete sections of about 1950 were not nominated to the National Register, and at sheet 30 the creek comes back to the surface and flows on to the Río Guanajibo.

   

   Objects

   8053 points, 27 lines

   Countries

   Puerto Rico

   Made with

   Google My Maps

10. Hidden Rivers Map: 96 Lost Streams Around the World

    Every pin is a post on the Hidden Waters blog, written between 2016 and December 2025: 96 streams that cities buried, straightened or forgot, from the Tank Stream in Sydney and the Kai Tak River in Hong Kong to the Nemiga in Minsk, Varnichny Creek in Murmansk, the Rio Seco in Luanda and the Vaipito Stream in Pago Pago. American cities are thick on the ground, Tiber Creek under Washington, Gayoso Bayou in Memphis, Chicago’s Bubbly Creek, and Long Island shows up in clusters, where even the ponds of Great Neck and Manhasset get a post of their own.

    

    Objects

    9696 points

    Countries

    United StatesCanadaLatviaand 28 more

    Made with

    Google My Maps

11. Sheffield Lost Rivers Map: 984 Brooks Drawn by Hand

    There is not a single description on this map, only 984 hand-drawn blue lines, nearly all labelled “Unknown Line Type”. Together they form a tree of Sheffield’s brooks, branching from the city centre west to the edge of the Peak District, south to Totley and Dronfield and north to Grenoside and Meadowhall. It shows better than any text how many streams a hilly industrial city had to put underground.

    

    Objects

    984984 lines

    Countries

    United Kingdom

    Made with

    Google My Maps

12. Ghost Rivers Map: Baltimore's Sumwalt Run, Site by Site

    “You are standing in the last remnant of the Sumwalt Run stream valley.” A public art walk through Baltimore’s Remington follows a creek that the city put into a brick and concrete tunnel in 1908, now 40 feet below the rowhouses. Its 12 sites read like a book: skaters on Sumwalt’s ice pond in the winter of 1895, “a tale of two sewers” (“Industrial chemicals, fabric dyes, human poop”), the Appalachian migrants who poured into the neighbourhood in the 1940s to 60s. One branch can still be heard running through storm sewers below the Baltimore Museum of Art’s sculpture garden, and at the last site the stream spills out of its culvert into the Jones Falls, “briefly seeing the sun”, before plunging back into tunnels under I-83.

    

    Objects

    2012 points, 6 lines, 2 areas

    Countries

    United States

    Made with

    Google My Maps

13. Senne River Map: Brussels' Buried River Tells Its Story

    “Ze hebben me begraven. Langzaam, verdrietig en vergiftigd, maar ik was niet dood”: they buried me, slowly, sadly and poisoned, but I was not dead. In this walk through Brussels the Senne speaks for itself, in Dutch, French and English, over six stops named Start, Life, Exchange, Pollution, Burial and Future. At the stop called Burial it makes a confession: this is not its path at all but the canal, and it has led you here because the fountain honours the man who buried it, Jules Anspach, “and under the arches, that’s me. Crushed.” It ends in the rain: the Senne no longer flows through the city, but sometimes it does.

    

    Objects

    2216 points, 6 lines

    Countries

    Belgium

    Made with

    Google My Maps

14. Sacramento Lost Waterways Map: The Great Desecrations

    Sutter first came ashore near 28th and B, “nowhere near the modern river channel”, because the old channel was filled in the 1860s. This map reconstructs Sacramento before the city: the high ground, the flood basin, the old confluence, a Pleistocene riverbed “still discernible in the rise and fall of streets through East Sac”, and a salt flat still bare in aerial photos of 1937. Sutter’s Fort, the author says, “makes more sense as the lair of Russian fur poachers”; nearly 500 Nisenan people lived at the upstream harbour until the Gold Rush drove them out. A layer called The Great Desecrations lists what came after, levees, gravel pits and freeways cut below sea level, and asks of the dump: “Who puts the dump right alongside the river, just upstream of town? Seriously.”

    

    Objects

    399 points, 17 lines, 13 areas

    Countries

    United States

    Made with

    Google My Maps

15. Tokyo Ankyo Map: Covered Streams, One Video Each

    The Tokyo Ankyo Expedition Corps (東京暗渠探検隊) sorts the city’s covered streams by watershed, Kanda, Meguro, Shibuya, Tama, Arakawa, the Tamagawa aqueduct, and links branch after branch to a video of walking it. The names are precise to the tributary, such as “Zenpukuji River, Horinouchi branch” or a branch named after a single block number. One branch at Mabashi Inari has two videos, from 2023 and 2026; others are marked ※動画なし, no video yet, and many are flagged 構想中, still being planned, so the map shows the expedition’s to-do list too.

    

    Objects

    556556 lines

    Countries

    Japan

    Made with

    Google My Maps

16. River Fleet Map: The Valley Under King's Cross

    The Fleet is buried, but its valley is not, and this map reads it from the streets: Field Street dips, Frederick Street Gardens sit in a depression that was once the riverbed, and Calthorpe Street rises because it once bridged the river. When King’s Cross station opened in 1852 the Fleet was rerouted along its front, which is why the frontage stands at an angle to the Euston Road; engineers later had 51 hours to move the river over the Thameslink tunnels and needed only 37. The source, Vale of Health in Hampstead, was once Hatchett’s Bottom, “waterlogged, malarial”, and the mouth is “now just a dark hole in the Embankment” under Blackfriars Bridge.

    

    Objects

    3836 points, 2 lines

    Countries

    United Kingdom

    Made with

    OpenStreetMap uMap

17. Milan Navigli Map: The Canals Milan Covered Over

    Until the end of the 1920s a canal about 6.5 kilometres long and 9 metres wide ringed the centre of Milan, and this map pins its covered course corner by corner, pairing old photographs with notes in Italian. The Laghetto di Santo Stefano, a little port of 1388, received the barges of Candoglia marble for the cathedral; the Naviglio della Martesana was filled in between the late 1960s and the 1970s; the Ponte delle Sirenette of 1842 was the first cast-iron bridge in Italy. What survives is marked too: the Conca di Viarenna lock, built by the cathedral works between 1551 and 1558, and the Darsena, the old harbour basin.

    

    Objects

    5544 points, 11 lines

    Countries

    Italy

    Made with

    Google My Maps

18. Still Creek Map: A Vancouver Salmon Creek, Lost and Found

    Still Creek’s culverts are named after what sits on top of them: Dick’s Lumber, Highway 1, the Rupert Square plaza, “BMW / United Furniture, etc”. This map splits the creek through Vancouver and Burnaby into above ground and below ground, and logs its comeback: enhancement work in 2005 and 2007, the Canadian Tire daylighting project of 2009, the Nootka restoration of 2011, and the joyous note “Salmon seen spawning here in 2012 and 2013!”. A layer from the book What Comes to Light: Stories of Still Creek Lost and Found adds a section filled in in the late 1950s, two former trestle bridges and a vanished burger stand.

    

    Objects

    7023 points, 47 lines

    Countries

    Canada

    Made with

    Google My Maps

19. Vienna Streams Map: 95 Former Brooks and Their Floods

    Vienna’s lost brooks are split here into 95 former surface courses and 137 that still flow, beside former canals and ponds. Many lines carry the hundred-year flood copied from the city’s signs at the stream, from 1.1 cubic metres per second at the Haidgraben to 96 at the Mauerbach, and the author admits doubt wherever it exists: “genauer Verlauf unsicher”, the exact course uncertain, or “nur ungefährer Verlauf”, only approximate, as for the old Hackinger Mühlbach mill race. Former ponds come with their size, such as a vanished harbour of about 1.7 hectares.

    

    Objects

    265239 lines, 26 areas

    Countries

    Austria

    Made with

    Google My Maps

20. Los Angeles Hidden Waterways Map: Arroyos Under the City

    Before Los Angeles was a grid of concrete channels it was crossed by the Arroyo de los Reyes, the Arroyo de la Sacatela, the Arroyo del Jardin de las Flores and the marshes of Las Cienegas, and Eric Brightwell has drawn them back over the city with Ballona Creek and many nameless channels marked only “?”. A wetlands layer marks what is left, from Ballona and Madrona Marsh to the Piute Ponds; Wonderland Creek links to LA Weekly’s story of the lost streams. A third layer outlines the county’s communities, many with a short history, such as Angeleno Heights, a streetcar suburb of 1886.

    

    Objects

    1,40517 points, 999 lines, 389 areas

    Countries

    United States

    Made with

    Google My Maps

21. Arakawa Ankyo Map: Tokyo's Covered Rivers on Foot

    The Omoigawa was filled in between the end of the Meiji era and the early Taishō years, and almost nothing is left of it but a name at a crossing, Namidabashi, “bridge of tears”, known from the boxing manga Ashita no Joe. This walking map of Tokyo’s Arakawa ward collects such traces of its covered rivers: bridge posts of the Aizome River, a road whose colour changes only where the lid covers it, the Otonashi River, culverted in 1934 and kept mainly in woodblock prints. In 1985, a note tells, a third grader at Ogu-Miyamae school brought a copy of an Edo-period map from home and found the old Hachiman-bori channel, which is now a promenade laid with picture tiles.

    

    Objects

    9824 points, 71 lines, 3 areas

    Countries

    Japan

    Made with

    Google My Maps

22. São Paulo Hidden Stream Map: The Córrego do Sapateiro

    The Sapateiro rises on the ridge that divides São Paulo east from west, and this urban drawing project follows it to the Pinheiros River through observation points and “imaginary lines”. On the 1930 map a candle factory was one of the few buildings beside the stream; the Mario Cardim favela stands there now. The municipal slaughterhouse of 1887, today the Cinemateca Brasileira, was put there because of the stream, and a small square is named after the barber Francisco Villano, who worked in the neighbourhood for 90 years and once swam in the creek. In Ibirapuera Park the water is visible again, treated to fill the park’s lake.

    

    Objects

    2620 points, 6 lines

    Countries

    Brazil

    Made with

    Google My Maps

23. Manila Buried River Walk: 6.9 km Along Lost Esteros

    A 6.9-kilometre GPX walk through Manila in six stops: “the head”, a field at the University of Santo Tomás that was marsh, where the 1915 map already draws the Sulucan creek covered; “the reach that stayed open” in Quiapo; the old mouth at Quinta Market, which a 1919 map still shows open. “The crossing they didn’t fix”, Taft Avenue at United Nations Avenue, still floods, the note says, citing VERA Files in 2025. The walk ends at the baywalk, “at the water it was all trying to reach”.

    

    Objects

    87 points, 1 line

    Countries

    Philippines

    Made with

    OpenStreetMap uMap