New contest for seven wonders of nature

LISBON, Portugal – The contest to name the new seven wonders of the world is over, and the contest to name the new seven wonders of nature is underway.

Brazil's Statue of Christ Redeemer, Peru's Machu Picchu, Mexico's Chichen Itza pyramid, the Great Wall of China, Jordan's Petra, the Colosseum in Rome and India's Taj Mahal were named the new seven wonders of the world on July 7 at a ceremony in Lisbon.

The sites were selected according to a tally of around 100 million votes cast by people around the world over the Internet and by cell phone text messages, the nonprofit organization that conducted the poll said.

The Great Pyramids of Giza, the only surviving structures from the original seven wonders of the ancient world, kept their status in addition to the new seven.

The campaign to pick the seven new wonders was begun in 1999 by Swiss adventurer Bernard Weber. His Switzerland-based foundation, called New7Wonders, received some 200 nominations from around the world and then narrowed the list to 21 candidates for the public to vote on. Among the sites that did not make the final list of seven wonders were the Statue of Liberty, Stonehenge and the Eiffel Tower.

Weber has now begun a new campaign to choose the new seven natural wonders of the world. The New7Wonders organization will accept nominations for the new list through Aug. 8, 2008, and will then narrow those nominations down to 21 for the public to vote on. Examples of wonders that would be eligible include animal reserves, canyons, fjords, coastlines, cliffs, forests, glaciers, mountains, deserts, oases, reefs, seas, lakes, rivers and waterfalls. For details, visit http://www.natural7wonders.com.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, maintains its own list of World Heritage sites and distanced itself from the seven wonders balloting, saying it reflected only the opinion of those who voted.

Organizers of the contest conceded there was no foolproof way to prevent people from voting more than once for their favorite. They claimed votes came in from every country in the world.

Except for Egypt's pyramids, all the other architectural marvels on the original ancient list of seven wonders have vanished. They were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharos lighthouse off Alexandria in Egypt.