Hey there! I’m John Green, and today we’re diving into some cool and quirky facts about famous landmarks from around the world. Did you know that the Mona Lisa has her own mailbox at the Louvre Museum in Paris? Yep, she’s received so many love letters that the museum had to set up a special place for them!
In the Chilean desert, there’s a giant sculpture called the Hand of the Desert. It’s a 36-foot tall left hand created by artist Mario Irarrázabal in 1992. Interestingly, he made a right hand sculpture in Uruguay about a decade earlier, which is about 1,200 miles away.
In Brazil, the iconic Christ the Redeemer statue almost looked different. The original design had Christ holding a cross in one hand and a globe in the other. Imagine how different it would have been!
In Toronto, Canada, the CN Tower has an observation deck with a glass floor. It’s so strong that it can hold the weight of 35 moose! That’s a lot of moose, and maybe even a famous Canadian rapper like Drake.
Did you know that a con artist named Victor Lustig managed to sell the Eiffel Tower twice in the 1930s? He tricked people into believing it was going to be torn down and sold the “scrap metal” to them. Talk about a sneaky deal!
The Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to the United States, was originally designed by Auguste Bartholdi as a lighthouse for the Suez Canal in Egypt. It was called “Egypt Bringing Light to Asia,” but when that plan didn’t work out, he repurposed the design for the statue we know today.
The Taj Mahal in India is known for its perfect symmetry, except for one detail. It was built by Emperor Shah Jahan as a memorial for his wife, and her tomb is at the center. When he died, his tomb was placed slightly to the west, breaking the symmetry.
The Tokyo Skytree is 634 meters tall, and there’s a reason for that specific height. It’s located in a region that used to be called Musashi, and the syllables “Mu,” “Sa,” and “Shi” mean 6, 3, and 4 in Japanese, respectively.
The London Eye has 32 capsules, one for each of London’s boroughs. However, there’s no capsule number 13 because it’s considered unlucky, so they skipped it and went straight to 33.
At Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, it rains all the time! The falls produce so much water vapor that it creates a continuous rain in the surrounding rainforest.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest man-made structure for over 3,800 years. Some people even believe aliens built it, but that’s just a myth!
Stonehenge in England is surrounded by mystery. Some theories suggest it was a map of the solar system or even built by aliens. Interestingly, the word “henge” comes from Stonehenge, but it technically isn’t a henge because it doesn’t have a ditch on the inside and a bank on the outside.
Three babies have been born on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco! It’s a landmark full of surprises.
In Greece, the Acropolis is home to a rare plant species that grows nowhere else in the world. It’s pink and only 20 cm tall, but its exact location is kept secret to protect it from tourists.
The Arc de Triomphe in France has an eternal flame to honor those who died in World War I. After President JFK was assassinated, Jackie Kennedy was inspired by this flame to have one lit for him as well.
Many workers died while building the Great Wall of China. Their families would take their bodies home with a rooster on the coffin, believing it would help the spirit accompany the body.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy once leaned in the opposite direction! It started tilting due to soft ground and a weak foundation, and as construction continued, the tilt shifted to its current position.
St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow is famous for its colorful domes, but it was originally white. It wasn’t painted until the 17th century, long after its completion in 1561.
Howard Hughes once owned 138 acres around the Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles. In 2002, the land was sold, and it almost became a site for mansions. However, it was saved and is now a protected park.
Thanks for joining me on this journey through some of the world’s most fascinating landmarks. Let me know in the comments which landmark or monument you’ve visited and loved. For me, it’s probably the Grand Canyon. And remember, don’t forget to be awesome!
Choose five landmarks from the article and create a fact book. For each landmark, write a short paragraph summarizing the most interesting fact you learned. Add illustrations or pictures to make your book visually appealing. Share your fact book with the class and discuss which landmark you found the most fascinating.
Imagine you are an architect tasked with designing a new landmark for your city. Draw a sketch of your landmark and write a brief description of its features and the story behind it. Consider what makes it unique and how it might become famous. Present your design to the class and explain your creative choices.
Work in pairs to create a trivia quiz based on the facts from the article. Write at least ten questions and answers, focusing on surprising or lesser-known details. Once your quiz is ready, swap with another pair and see how many questions you can answer correctly. Discuss any new facts you learned from each other.
Use online resources to take a virtual tour of one of the landmarks mentioned in the article. Write a short report about your experience, including what you saw and any additional facts you discovered. Share your findings with the class and compare your virtual tour experiences.
Choose a landmark from the article and research its historical and cultural significance. Prepare a short presentation arguing why it is the most important landmark in the world. Participate in a class debate, listening to others’ arguments and defending your choice. Reflect on what makes a landmark significant and how they impact our understanding of history and culture.
Sure! Here’s a sanitized version of the transcript:
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Hi, I’m John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is a Mental Floss video, and did you know that the Mona Lisa has her own mailbox at the Louvre? She’s received her fair share of love letters over the years, so the museum has a designated place for them to go.
That’s the first of many facts about famous landmarks I’m going to share with you today. The Hand of the Desert in Chile is a 36-foot tall left hand that rises out of the desert sand. It was created by sculptor Mario Irarrázabal in 1992, and he actually made a right hand about 10 years prior in Uruguay, about 1,200 miles away.
Another impressive South American statue is Christ the Redeemer. In the original design for the statue, Christ was holding a cross in one hand and a globe in the other. The famous Canadian landmark, the CN Tower in Toronto, has an observation level with a glass floor, and according to load tests, it’s supposed to be sturdy enough to support 35 moose, not to mention at least one Drake.
If you’re wondering what kind of skyscraper needs an observation deck that can hold 35 moose, you’ve clearly never been to Canada. Speaking of towers, in 1979, businessmen from Washington tried to buy Seattle’s Space Needle and move it. The problem? They offered to pay a mere $1 million, which is less than a quarter of what it cost to build.
But that sort of thing did work for Victor Lustig—well, sort of. He managed to sell the Eiffel Tower twice in the 1930s. Lustig was a con man who somehow convinced people in the scrap metal industry that the tower was going to be torn down, and he was offering them the scraps.
Speaking of France, the Statue of Liberty was sculpted by a Frenchman, Auguste Bartholdi, and he originally designed it as a lighthouse for the Suez Canal in Egypt, titled “Egypt Bringing Light to Asia,” but that didn’t work out, so he repurposed the design.
The Hagia Sophia is unique in that it was made out of materials from an ancient wonder of the world. The builders used columns from the Temple of Artemis in its construction. Moving on to the Taj Mahal, it’s perfectly symmetrical with one exception: the emperor Shah Jahan had the Taj Mahal built as a memorial for one of his wives. Her tomb is in the center, but when he died, his was added slightly to the west.
The Tokyo Skytree is located in a region that used to be called Musashi, and when you take those syllables separately, they actually mean 6, 3, and 4, which is why the tower is exactly 634 meters tall.
Jumping south to Australia, there used to be a net above the orchestra pit in the Sydney Opera House for a strange reason. In the 1980s, there was a performance of the opera “Boris Godunov” involving a live chicken. The chicken walked off stage and onto a pianist.
There are 32 boroughs in London, so the London Eye has 32 total capsules. They’re numbered, but the builders opted to skip the unlucky number 13, so there’s a capsule 33 nearby.
Is Big Ben in Elizabeth Tower? Because radio waves travel faster than sound itself, you can hear Big Ben chime on the radio before you can hear it from the base of the tower. While we’re on the subject of places where it rains a lot, it literally rains 24/7 at the Victoria Falls rainforest in Zimbabwe. This is because the falls produce so much water vapor that it just continuously rains.
Moving on to a somewhat less natural phenomenon, the Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest man-made structure for over 3,800 years. Also, the pyramids are sometimes wrongly attributed to aliens. Similarly, because Stonehenge in England was constructed millennia ago, there are lots of theories about what it was for. For instance, some say that aliens made it as a map of the solar system or that it’s the work of the devil.
Bonus Stonehenge fact: the word “henge” comes from Stonehenge, but the word came to mean an area with a ditch on the inside and a bank on the outside. Stonehenge is actually the exact opposite of that, so it’s not technically a henge.
We know significantly more about the Golden Gate Bridge than we do about Stonehenge. For instance, three babies have been born there. Bram Stoker, author of “Dracula,” never actually went to the famous Bran Castle in Romania. He may have seen pictures, and people believe Dracula’s home was based on it, but there’s no confirmation of that.
There’s a species of plant that grows only in one place in the entire world: the Acropolis in Greece. It’s pink and just 20 cm tall, but we don’t know exactly where it can be found because they don’t want tourists investigating.
Pope Clement XII allowed the lottery in Italy in 1731 after it had been banned, and a portion of the profits were used to finance the Trevi Fountain, which is cool and everything, but in Las Vegas, there’s a casino where a portion of the profits were used to create a miniature Venice. It’s just like regular Venice—slightly run down, doesn’t smell that great, and nobody lives there anymore.
Sorry, that was a little hard on Venetians—or it would have been if people still lived in Venice. Anyway, the Arc de Triomphe in France has an eternal flame lit for those who died in World War I. Jackie Kennedy once visited the monument with JFK, and after he was assassinated, she was inspired by the Arc to have an eternal flame lit for him.
Many people died while constructing the Great Wall of China, and they were honored in a tradition in which their families would return the body home with a rooster on the coffin. That was supposed to help the spirit accompany the body on the return down the wall.
The Great Buddha statue in Japan has previously sat in two temples in that exact spot; both were destroyed—one by a typhoon in the 14th century and one by a tsunami in the 15th—but the statue has remained.
In 1937, a bill was introduced in Congress to have Susan B. Anthony’s head added to Mount Rushmore, but a rider was passed that locked funding for only the heads that had already been started, so the addition never went anywhere.
The Lotus Temple in India was named the most visited building in the world in 2001. It’s still on par with the Taj Mahal in terms of visitors, and amazingly, it was only the seventh-ever Bahá’à place of worship built.
The Forbidden City is one of China’s most famous landmarks, and up until 2011, we had our own version here in the United States. In Texas, a businessman opened a replica of the ancient Forbidden City at 12% of the original size. It cost around $14 million total to build and lasted for 15 years, so you know, not quite as successful as the actual Forbidden City.
People used to be able to cross the Tower Bridge in London even while it was raised. When it was constructed in the 19th century, there were stairs to the tops of each of the towers with walkways connecting the two, but people usually just waited for the bridge to come back down because they hated walking upstairs so much. The stairs were eventually closed in 1910.
Speaking of stairs, there are over 100 separate flights of stairs at Machu Picchu, which is pretty incredible when you realize that most of the individual staircases were created from a single stone.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa once leaned in the other direction. Construction on the tower started in 1173, and it started leaning in the first place because of soft ground and a bad foundation. The construction stopped and then started again in 1272, and as more layers were added, the tilt actually shifted to the direction it now leans.
In 1972, a man ran into St. Peter’s Basilica with a hammer, yelled “I am Jesus Christ,” and removed large chunks of the Michelangelo statue. The statue had also lost some fingers in a move during the 18th century, so that’s why it now sits behind bulletproof glass.
St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, Russia, is famous for its colorful appearance, but it was actually originally white. It was completed in 1561 and didn’t get painted until the 17th century.
And finally, I returned to my salon to tell you that Howard Hughes used to own 138 acres around the Hollywood Sign. They were sold in 2002, and some mansions almost went up in the region, but the Trust for Public Land bought the area, and it’s now a protected park.
Thanks for watching my video, which is made with the help of all these nice people. Let me know in the comments what the best landmark or monument you’ve ever been to is. For me, probably the Grand Canyon. And as we say in my hometown, don’t forget to be awesome!
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Landmark – A significant or historical building or site that is easily recognized and often visited. – The Eiffel Tower is a famous landmark in Paris that attracts millions of tourists each year.
History – The study of past events, particularly in human affairs. – In history class, we learned about the ancient civilizations of Egypt and their contributions to modern society.
Sculpture – A three-dimensional work of art created by shaping or combining materials such as stone, metal, or wood. – The museum displayed a beautiful marble sculpture of a Greek goddess.
Symmetry – A balanced and proportional similarity between two halves of an object or design. – The artist’s painting was admired for its perfect symmetry and vibrant colors.
Design – The plan or arrangement of elements in a work of art or architecture. – The architect’s design for the new building included large windows and a rooftop garden.
Museum – A building or institution that houses and displays collections of artifacts and works of art. – We visited the art museum to see the new exhibit on Renaissance paintings.
Pyramid – A monumental structure with a square or triangular base and sloping sides that meet at a point, often used as a tomb in ancient Egypt. – The Great Pyramid of Giza is one of the most well-known pyramids in the world.
Statue – A carved or cast figure of a person or animal, especially one that is life-sized or larger. – The statue of Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C., is a popular site for visitors.
Tower – A tall, narrow building or structure that may serve as a lookout, support, or landmark. – The medieval castle had a tall tower that provided a view of the surrounding countryside.
Artist – A person who creates art, such as paintings, drawings, or sculptures, as a profession or hobby. – The artist spent years perfecting her technique before her work was displayed in galleries.
