• What ancient monument could collapse within the next five years?
What World Heritage site is already one-third gone?
Here are 15 historical places that are crumbling because of tourism.
15 – The Great Pyramids • Physically, the Pyramids are having a
hard time because of erosion.
But they’re such a common tourist trap now, that the history and culture of the site has
really worn off.
• Visitors to the pyramids today see that they can “see them from Pizza Hut,” where
they’re surely getting a very traditional Egyptian experience.
14 – Jaisalmer • Jaisalmer, a medieval-era city in India,
is considered a World Heritage site, and has seen its tourism quadruple in the last decade
or so.
• It’s a beautiful city… but it’s kind of made of sandstone.
• That makes it hard to maintain as it is, but it also suffers from a sewage system that
has cracked and flooded under the number of visitors it gets now.
13 – Machu Picchu • Machu Picchu is Peru’s most significant
historical site, and one of the most popular tourist destinations in South America.
• But it’s ultimately ancient infrastructure built at the top of a mountain.
The entire area is under threat of a massive landslide, and every year hundreds of thousands
of tourists weaken things a little more.
• And those are just the regular ones.
In 2000, during an on-location shoot for a beer commercial, the “hitching post of the
sun,” – an ancient sundial – was damaged by a fallen boom mic.
12 – The Colosseum • Defacing the walls of Rome’s ancient
Colosseum is expressly forbidden.
So naturally, people do it all the time.
• Several times in the last year, tourists from America, France, Russia, and any number
of other places have been arrested for carving their initials, names, or other things into
the walls of the historic site.
11 – Stonehenge • Stonehenge is considered one of the world’s
most disappointing tourist destinations, and also one of its most threatened.
• Traffic continues to choke the roads past Stonehenge, which is increasingly just a small
site in the middle of nowhere.
It took until 2013 for them to even build so much as a visitor center.
• Most days, people can’t even get close to the stones.
But when they do, on the summer and winter solstices, the site suffers all sorts of damage,
from graffiti, to chewing gum, to people literally trying to light fires on them.
10 – The Galapagos Islands • The Galapagos Islands are basically the
reason we have the theory of evolution, and the wildlife on these secluded islands is
some of the most unique in the world.
• Unfortunately, word has gotten out, and the islands now host about 200 thousand tourists
a year.
• And what generally happens when you take a delicate, secluded ecosystem and jam 200,000
humans into it?
Yeah, that’s what’s happening.
9 – Taj Mahal • The Taj Mahal brings in over 3 million
visitors a year, more than twice that of any other tourist destination in India.
• But the marble structure has been ravaged by pollution from surrounding factories and
industry.
• And the wooden floors have become so damaged by the intense foot traffic, experts believe
the foundation could collapse within the next five years.
8 – The Parthenon • The Parthenon hasn’t really been the
victim of extreme damage from tourists directly.
It’s just that Greece hasn’t put much effort into maintaining it.
• Previous attempts to restore the Parthenon to MAKE it more accessible to tourists have
actually done MORE damage.
• Iron pins added to stabilize the structure in the 19th century ended up rusting, causing
new cracks in the marble.
The Parthenon also suffers from pollution damage.
7 – Great Barrier Reef • Mostly, people who visit the Great Barrier
Reef are respectful of it, and treat it with care and caution.
• But a small number of visitors will trample on parts of the reef, or damage them by getting
a little too handsy while diving.
• That’s to say nothing of people who head out there on their boats and just toss
their anchors onto the Reef. 6 – Tulum
• Tulum is one of the last bastions of Mayan civilization.
Unfortunately, it’s also close to Cancun, and it treated similarly.
• Tulum is an important site for both history and ecology, but important areas are being
cleared out for more beach resorts.
• Mexico’s government had to cancel nine major construction projects in 2015 just to
stem the tide.
5 – Angkor Wat • Cambodia’s Angkor Wat saw a massive
explosion in tourism, from about 7,600 tourists in 1993, to about 3 million visitors in 2010.
• Damage is being done to the 1,000-year-old temple daily, with thousands of people a day
climbing on walls, stepping on statues, and touching everything they can.
4 – Antarctica • A fair number of people visit Antarctica
every year to see penguins, ski, and just experience the extremes of the climate.
• And with tourists come trash, and disturbed ice shelves, and a bunch of very upset penguins.
3 - Bali • Bali has become one of the most famed
tourist destinations in the Pacific ocean, and now it is being destroyed by its own success.
• The environment, culture, and even local language of Bali is under attack by an onslaught
of tourism, as the island paradise slowly becomes an overdeveloped concrete jungle of
a tourist trap.
2 – Mount Everest • Mount Everest is covered with trash, because
who is going to go up there and pick up litter?
• Of course, it’s not all water bottles and chip bags.
The remains of climbers who didn’t quite make it to the top also cover the slopes of
the world’s most famous mountain.
1 – The Great Wall of China • It’s no secret that the Great Wall of
China is an impressive historic monument.
• Everybody knows you can see it from space, and that it’s been there for centuries.
• What you may not know is that about a third of it is gone.
Despite efforts to maintain it, the wall is crumbling from age and heavy foot traffic.
• It was only really built for a few soliders to walk along the top of it.
Now it suffers the weight of millions of visitors a year.