New Seven Wonders of the World: High Stakes in an Old Game

As I write, the competition is heating up for the New Seven Wonders of the World to be announced on July 7 of this year.

This list of visitable places, all manmade and in an acceptable state of preservation, includes sights on all six continents. The prize, the publicity each New Wonder will receive.

In my adopted country of Mexico, INAH, the government entity that maintains Chitzen Itza, a New Wonders nominee, is already gearing up for a much larger number of tourists to the already popular site if its most famous pyramid is named as a New Wonder of the World.

The idea for New Wonders of the World come from the Swiss profit-making organization New Open World Corporation. NOWC started from a selection of 200 existing possibilities, then narrowed them down to twenty one, Wikipedia has information on the voting system which sounds as if it will be subject to purchased votes.

The new list is the latest successor to many, the first several dating from the days of ancient Greece. Antipater, writing in the second century BC, included the Pyramid at Giza in Egypt, the hanging gardens of Babylon, the Lighthouse at Alexandria, the Colossus of Rodes and three sites in his own country.

Much later someone thought up a retrospective list of wonders of the Middle Ages including such well-known sites as the Hagia Sofia, the leaning tower of Pisa, the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing, the Colosseum, Stonehenge and the Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa.

One of my favorite Wonders lists was compiled by The American Society of Civil Engineers in the 1990s. The organization chose three 20^th Century American accomplishments, the Golden Gate Bridge, Empire State Building, and Panama Canal. Others on the list were the Netherlands North Sea protection, the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France, the Itaipu Dam on the Brazil/Paraguay border and Canada's CN Tower.

The only U.S. monument on the New Wonders list is the Statue of Liberty but not long ago CNN created a list of Seven Natural Wonders of the World included the Grand Canyon along with the Great Barrier Reef, Rio de Janeiro harbor, Mount Everest, the Northern Lights, Paricutin volcano and Victoria Falls.

The current New Wonders of the World lists candidates from all the continents and beyond including Easter Island in the Pacific. Australia's Sydney Opera House makes the list as does the US's Statue of Liberty (actually a gift from France,) Unsurprisingly, the Eiffel Tower, Colosseum, Acropolis, Alhambra and Stonehenge in Europe are listed. Asia is well-represented by Angkor Wat, the Great Wall and the Taj Mahal, among others. In the Middle East, Petra is included.

The city of Timbuktu in Mali is the only site on the New Seven Wonders list from Africa. Maybe you're wondering what has happened to the Great Pyramid, which at the start of the new competition was the only remaining entry that also appeared on the Greek list. Isn't it still considered a wonder? After some controversy in Egypt, it was removed from the list of potential wonders to be voted on and designated the only Honorary Wonder.