The Seven Wonders of the World for 2024
When it came to a choice between printing truth and myth, it’s safe to assume that Herodotus, author of the original list of the seven ancient wonders of the world, had a relationship with the verifiable that was strained far, far, beyond breaking point.
OK, so it seems that the ancient Greek traveller and historian made it to the Giza pyramids, and he probably travelled to Babylon (though he neglected to mention the hanging gardens in his write-up). But his seven wonders of the world were penned amid a travel writing career that also included supposedly true tales of goat-headed men and gold-digging ants the size of foxes.
Hmmm… So, assuming that Herodotus and painstaking accuracy have as much in common as the novels of James Patterson and James Joyce, perhaps it’s not overtly sacrosanct for us to construct successive modern versions that have a stronger relationship with fact – these are our seven wonders of the world for 2024.
Seven Wonders of the World for 2024
Table Mountain, Cape Town, South Africa
The anonymous account of Vasco da Gama's 1497 voyage around the southern tip of Africa fails to mention the dramatic, sable and toffee-coloured mesa that we call Table Mountain, possibly due to it being at least partially smothered in the cloud – or the ‘table cloth’ as locals term it today. Today, the mountain remains Cape Town’s signature draw for visitors, who generally take the cable car to the summit, and for locals, who prefer to hike up it on a weekend.
The Platteklip Gorge route is the most direct path to the top, taking only an hour if you’re fit. Be warned, however, that it’s a one-hour that is lung-puncturing tough and liable to leave you sweating and ravenous by the time you reach the pancake flat peak. It is worth it, though, for those shimmering views out over the meeting point of the Atlantic and the Indian oceans. You’re sure to meet a ‘dassie’ too. These cute, gerbil-sized creatures scurry around the table top and, remarkably, are the closest related relatives to the elephant.
Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, USA
In a contentious election year in the United States, there are few places more worthy of attention than Mount Rushmore. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt are the quartet of Presidents carved into stone so hard that its estimated that it erodes at a rate of one inch every 10,000 years. Clearly, when John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum began the project in 1927, he intended it to last. Critics may have long been disdainful of the idea of making mere humans into God-like figures, carved into rock – the concept might divide, baffling some and delighting others, but there's no denying this is a spectacle worth witnessing.
Volcanic lava tubes, Tenerife, Canary Islands
Far underneath the beaches, golf courses and sun loungers of Tenerife lies a labyrinth of volcanic lava tubes, all created by the eruption of the Pico Viejo volcano 27,000 years ago. What is known to locals as the Wind Caves consist of, uniquely, three tiers of tubes, snaking and weaving through the earth. The network is so fiendishly complicated that maps of the small amounts of the complex that have been accessed look akin to a maze of human veins and blood vessels.
It’s believed less than 30 per cent of the tubes have yet been discovered, but those that have been walked and crawled through have been found to contain previously unknown species, including entirely white spiders and wingless, eyeless cockroaches. Visitor numbers are limited to 1,000 a month for the 250 metre stretch of tubes that are open to the public. Even in this tiny section, the tunnels curve, open, narrow and reveal innumerable side alleys and branch lines.
Flow Country, Scotland
Listed to potentially be designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site this year (a decision is expected in the next six months), the Flow Country, in Sutherland and Caithness in the far north of Scotland, is a half million acre of lochens by the hundred (this is the local term for small lochs), bog and, if scientific estimates are accurate, around 400 million tonnes of carbon.
Flow (descended from the old Norse word ‘floi’, meaning ‘marshy ground’) is one of the most valuable carbon sinks in Europe and has been developing for the last nine thousand years. This immense peatland may not be the easiest terrain to navigate but take the mile-long Dubh Lochan boardwalk and flagstone trail that crosses over the peat banks, and you’ll get a true flavour of ‘blanket bog’ country; which comes complete with greenshanks, golden plovers and harriers nesting or flying above the carpet of bogbean, sphagnum moss, asphodel, butterwort and the insect catching sundew. A decision on whether UNESCO status is expected to come in the next six months.
Quinkan Country, Queensland, Australia
In remotest Queensland, Eastern Australia, the landscape around Cape York and the minuscule settlement of Laura at first seems to contain little but one dirt road, eucalyptus and the occasional black burnt tree trunk. Yet First Nation people have lived in this area for at least 13,000 years. The evidence is everywhere in the form of the paintings they have left on the sandstone escarpments and plateaus. Now, AI is helping us realise just how much remains to be rediscovered.
In 2022, western Yalanji traditional owners of the land and a Queensland technology consulting firm joined forces to use drones, artificial intelligence and mapping technology to establish if there are any more gallery paintings that have been lost to history. So far, 15 Quinkan rock art sites not previously known to have existed have been discovered. It seems the wild bush of this remote corner of Australia is far from finished when it comes to revealing its age-old secrets.
The migration of the Arctic tern
Next time you’re stuck in a traffic jam or waiting for a delayed flight, take a moment to consider the annual journey of the Arctic tern. No creature on earth has a longer migration, flying 60,000 miles from the far north of Europe to the Antarctic and back again. They don’t even take the most direct route during their journey, making the distance they fly even further than that; nobody is quite sure how much.
What is certain is that the arctic tern’s migration is one of the longest of any animal on earth. But why? Scientists believe that the epic distances terns traverse are due to their need to escape both Arctic and Antarctic winters where food is scarce and there is no light. This means that during the mere two months in which they make the vast longitudinal journey, it’s possible to see Arctic terns in almost every continent, popping up from Tierra del Fuego to South Africa, while terns that hatched in Greenland have been sighted in Australia.
Great Zimbabwe
Constructed a thousand years ago, Great Zimbabwe was one of the very first truly international trading hubs. However, since its re-discovery, archaeologists have been obsessed with attributing its construction to Phoenicians, Babylonians, or, indeed, it seems, almost anyone except Africans themselves.
Thankfully, the pure weight of scientific evidence shows that Great Zimbabwe’s 32-foot-high stone walls were constructed by Indigenous hands and were home to thousands of people. Situated near gold fields, this was one of the fulcrums of a mercantile network that stretched up the East African coast and over to Arabia, Persia and China.
Nobody is certain why Great Zimbabwe appears to have been abandoned in about 1450. Some assume that it was due to the gold fields becoming exhausted. What is certain is that the prejudice of the colonial era, with its false narrative that the splendour of Great Zimbabwe could possibly have been built by an African community, has long been banished. A thousand years on from its conception, Great Zimbabwe is proof indeed that modern ideas of civilisation, community and commerce are far from being Western creations.