Top Five World Wonders Substitutions

This list is reserved for potential new nominees to the list that would replace a structure in the same country which is already nominated.

1. Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, United States
The Golden Gate Bridge would replace the Statute of Liberty, which, while a beautiful and enduring symbol of the American Dream, is undersized and rather unremarkable from an engineering standpoint. Not only is the Golden Gate Bridge gorgeous, it was the largest bridge of its type when constructed (remaining massive to this day) and conquers a notoriously difficult tidal channel.

2. Cathedral of Notre Dame, Chartres, France
The Eiffel Tower might be worthy of inclusion on the list, but we should still consider the Cathedral of Chartres. It is the pinnacle of gothic architecture, with intricate carvings around the doors and windows and a soaring vaulted roof which seems to hover over the cathedral, thanks to the flying buttress support system.

3. Forbidden City, Beijing, China
Nothing in the world can possibly rival the Great Wall for sheer mass and breadth. The Forbidden City, which not quite as large, is still remarkable in its own right. The former palace of China's emperors is a complex consisting of 800 buildings (including a Starbucks), spanning an area of 172 acres. The roofs of all the different buildings are covered in yellow tiles with a series of intricately carved statuettes on each corner, the number of which signify the status of the building.

4. Nazca Lines, Peru
Machu Picchu is a wonderful example of how the Incas tamed topography and harsh climate at high elevations in order to construct a self-supporting city in the heights on the Andes. Equally impressive, however, are the pictoglyphs in the Nazca desert. There are over seventy animal and human figures carved in the ground. Since many of the figures approach 900 feet in length, they are not visible except from the air. Lacking the technology to view their creations from above means that the Nazca people had to make their designs without the benefit of even seeing what they were doing.

5. Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, Russia
The original list cheats by lumping The Kremlin and St. Basil's Cathedral together as one wonder, since they are actually separate structures, constructed at very different times. Instead, I propose the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. While not as stereotypically Russian as St. Basil's, the Winter Palace is a rococo masterpiece indicative of the imperial excess that eventually doomed the tsars. The palace, on the banks of the Neva river, has over 1,000 rooms, many of which are filled with ornately sclupted and gilded architectural flourishes.