Travellers to the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World would dash off an epigram: “Lo, apart from Olympus, the sun never looked on aught so grand,” Antipater of Sidon wrote of the Temple of Artemis.
Today’s tourists are more likely to post a selfie on Instagram.
A list of the buildings and structures most often hashtagged in photographs on the photo-sharing site has been compiled to reveal the Seven Wonders of the social media world. Only three predate the 19th century.
The most popular landmark for Instagrammers is the Eiffel Tower, with 3.1 million photographs uploaded with the #eiffeltower hashtag. Including posts with the #toureiffel tag would add another 1.5 million.
Many of the photos depict the landmark at night or with arty black and white filters, while images of couples kissing or embracing at its base are perennially popular. Paris features twice in the list, with Notre Dame taking the fifth spot, with 1.17 million tagged posts.
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Elizabeth Tower is second, with 2.2 million. Most photographs depict the clocktower that houses Big Ben from across the river or floodlit at night.
The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco comes in third, with 1.43 million images — many featuring sunsets or atmospheric fog. The Burj Khalifa skyscraper, the world’s tallest structure, is fourth, with 1.38 million.
The only Unesco World Heritage Site to make the list, with 674,428 pictures, is the Alhambra Palace in Granada. The remote Inca citadel of Machu Picchu in Peru — endpoint of the Inca Trail — is the seventh wonder, with 655,170 hashtagged posts.
The list was compiled by CEWE Photoworld, the photographic print company, which counted the most hashtagged sites from the top 25 tourist destinations chosen in a poll by TripAdvisor.
The Great Pyramid of Giza, the only survivor of the ancient Seven Wonders, did not get a look-in.
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Based on Instagram’s own geolocation data rather than hashtags, the most Instagrammed places last year were the Disney and Universal Studios theme parks.