Petra: The Rose City Carved Into Rock
Petra wasn’t built so much as carved, its temples and tombs cut directly into rose-red sandstone cliffs by the Nabataeans, an Arab…
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Christ the Redeemer: A Statue Built by Public Subscription
Christ the Redeemer wasn’t a government project, it was funded almost entirely by donations from Brazil’s Catholic community, following a fundraising campaign…
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Niagara Falls: Three Waterfalls, Slowly Moving Upstream
Niagara Falls isn’t one waterfall but three: the Horseshoe Falls, mostly on the Canadian side, along with the American Falls and the…
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Mount Fuji: The Volcano That Became a Symbol
Mount Fuji is, technically, an active volcano, though it has not erupted since 1707, when its last eruption blanketed Edo, now Tokyo,…
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The Colosseum: Rome’s Arena Built by an Emperor’s Prisoners
The Colosseum was built to erase a predecessor. Emperor Vespasian commissioned it around 72 CE on the site of a private lake…
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Big Ben: The Bell That Isn’t Really the Tower
Technically, Big Ben isn’t the clock tower at all, it’s the Great Bell inside it. The tower itself, officially the Elizabeth Tower…
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Stonehenge: A Monument That Still Keeps Its Secrets
Stonehenge was built in stages, over roughly 1,500 years, beginning around 3000 BCE, with the massive sarsen stones that give the monument…
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The Amalfi Coast: A Road Carved Along the Edge of a Cliff
The Amalfi Coast’s defining feature, the road, is almost as famous as the scenery it runs through. The Strada Statale 163, completed…
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Neuschwanstein Castle: The Fairy Tale Built by a King Who Never Wanted an Audience
Neuschwanstein Castle was never meant to be seen by the public. King Ludwig II of Bavaria commissioned it in 1869 as a…
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Santorini: The Island Built From a Volcano’s Memory
The crescent shape of Santorini isn’t an accident of geography, it’s the rim of a volcanic caldera, the collapsed remains of one…
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Venice’s Grand Canal: A Highway Built on Water
The Grand Canal isn’t really a canal at all, it’s a natural tidal channel, following the course of an ancient river, that…
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Fushimi Inari Taisha: Kyoto’s Tunnel of a Thousand Gates
The vermillion gates of Fushimi Inari Taisha don’t just decorate the mountainside, they form a continuous tunnel, thousands of them in unbroken…
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