The tower that was meant to come down
The EIFFEL Tower was built for the World's Fair in Paris in 1889, to mark a hundred years since the French Revolution, and at 300 metres it was the tallest structure in the world. Many Parisian artists and writers signed a letter protesting against it as a useless monstrosity. It was only supposed to stand for twenty years, and it was saved partly because it proved useful as a giant radio aerial. The iron expands in summer heat, and the top can be around fifteen centimetres taller on a hot day than in winter. It is repainted by hand about every seven years, using around sixty tonnes of paint.
BIG BEN is not the tower at the Houses of Parliament in London but the huge bell inside it. The tower itself was renamed the Elizabeth Tower in 2012 to mark Queen Elizabeth the Second's sixty years on the throne.
Straightening the tower at Pisa
The bell TOWER at PISA began to lean while it was still being built in the 1170s, because it stood on soft, sandy ground, and builders tried to correct the tilt by making the upper storeys slightly curved. By the late 1900s it was leaning so far that it was closed for more than ten years while engineers carefully removed soil from beneath the higher side. When it reopened in 2001 it had been straightened by about forty centimetres, enough, they calculated, to keep it standing for centuries.
A lost city in the rocks
PETRA, a city carved into rose-red sandstone cliffs in Jordan, was the capital of the Nabataean people around two thousand years ago. For centuries it was known only to local Bedouin. In 1812 a Swiss explorer, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, reached it disguised as a traveller from the Middle East, having heard stories of a lost city, and made it famous in Europe.
A tomb built for love
The TAJ MAHAL in Agra, India, was built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan as a tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in 1631. Around twenty thousand workers and a thousand elephants are said to have worked on it for over twenty years. Its white marble is inlaid with thousands of semi-precious stones, and it seems to change colour through the day, pink at dawn and golden at sunset.
The ALHAMBRA in Granada, Spain, a palace and fortress of the Moorish rulers, is covered inside with intricate patterns and Arabic writing carved into plaster. Our architects page covers the people who design landmarks like these, and our ancient Egypt page the real story of the PYRAMIDS and the SPHINX.
Monuments from every age
The oldest landmarks in the grid are prehistoric: STONEHENGE was built in stages from around 3000 BC, with some of its stones dragged from Wales, more than 200 kilometres away. The ACROPOLIS in Athens is crowned by the PARTHENON, a temple to the goddess Athena, and the PANTHEON in Rome still has the largest dome made of unreinforced concrete in the world, nearly two thousand years after it was built. The COLOSSEUM, the KREMLIN in Moscow, the LOUVRE in Paris, the Statue of LIBERTY, a Japanese PAGODA, an Egyptian OBELISK and every great CATHEDRAL, STATUE and MONUMENT make up the rest. Our US landmarks page covers the Statue of Liberty in detail.