Have You Seen the New Seven Wonders? What Counts as Seeing One

The New Seven Wonders sound like the easiest list in travel to count. There are seven of them, they are world-famous, and you would surely remember standing in front of one. Then you try to write the number down and the questions start. You walked a stretch of wall an hour outside Beijing: is that the Great Wall, or a small piece of a 21,000-kilometre structure? You saw the Colosseum from a bus window: does that count? You reached the Treasury at Petra and turned back before the Monastery: have you seen Petra?

This piece sets out where the list came from, the three rules people actually use to count it, and how MapMyWorld decides it. That last part includes a generous rule and a display bug, and we explain both.

Where the list came from

The New Seven Wonders are not an official designation. The list came out of a public vote run by the New7Wonders Foundation, founded by the Swiss-Canadian filmmaker Bernard Weber. The winners were announced on 7 July 2007 at the Estádio da Luz in Lisbon (Wikipedia). The seven are:

• Great Wall of China (China)
• Petra (Jordan)
• Christ the Redeemer (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
• Machu Picchu (Peru)
• Chichén Itzá (Yucatán, Mexico)
• Colosseum (Rome, Italy)
• Taj Mahal (Agra, India)

The Pyramids of Giza were given honorary status outside the seven, because the Great Pyramid is the only survivor of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

The poll was held online and by phone, and people could vote more than once, which is one reason it is widely described as unscientific. UNESCO kept its distance. In a June 2007 statement it said there was "no comparison" between the campaign and its own work on the World Heritage List (Wikipedia).

None of that makes the list less worth completing. It does mean nobody official will settle your count for you. If you want a list with a formal definition and a register behind it, the World Heritage List is that list. We covered how to log it in How to Record Every UNESCO World Heritage Site You've Visited. The Seven Wonders are a popular vote, so the rule for "seen it" is yours to set.

Why "seen it" is harder than it sounds

The seven are very different kinds of thing, and one rule fits them unevenly.

Two are single objects. Christ the Redeemer is one statue, 30 metres tall on an 8-metre pedestal, on top of the 700-metre Corcovado mountain (Wikipedia). It can be seen from much of Rio. The Taj Mahal is one mausoleum inside one walled complex. For these two, "seen" and "visited" can come apart: you can see the statue from Copacabana without ever going up the hill.

Three are sites you walk into. The Colosseum, Machu Picchu and Chichén Itzá each have a ticketed boundary. Inside the boundary is clearly a visit. Outside it is clearly not. Seeing the Colosseum from the street is the one really contested case, because it stands in the middle of a city and most people in Rome pass it whether they plan to or not.

Two are landscapes. Petra is not one building. The archaeological site covers about 264 square kilometres, and the Monastery is Petra's largest monument, a climb of roughly 800 steps beyond the more famous Treasury (Wikipedia). The Great Wall is harder still. China's 2012 national survey put the total length of all its walls, trenches and natural barriers at 21,196 kilometres. The better-preserved Ming wall accounts for about 8,850 of those (China Highlights, Wikipedia). Nobody has "seen" the Great Wall. People have seen a section of it.

So a counting rule has to answer two questions. Does looking count, or do you have to go in? And for the two landscapes, how much is enough?

Three rules, three totals

Take a traveller who has done the following. They spent three days in Rome and saw the Colosseum from the outside but skipped the queue. They walked the Badaling section of the Great Wall on a Beijing stopover. They got to Petra's Treasury and turned back in the heat. And they went properly inside both Machu Picchu and Chichén Itzá.

Rule 1: in sight. If you saw it with your own eyes, it counts. Every one of the five above counts, including the Colosseum from the pavement. This is the most generous rule and the easiest to defend at a dinner table. It also struggles with Christ the Redeemer, which you can arguably "see" from an aeroplane over Rio. Total: 5.

Rule 2: through the gate. It counts if you entered the ticketed or bounded site. The Colosseum drops out. Petra and the Great Wall stay in, because the Treasury is inside the Petra site and Badaling is a gated section of the wall. Total: 4.

Rule 3: the defining part. It counts only if you reached the thing the wonder is famous for. You have to be inside the Colosseum's arena, on the terrace at the Taj Mahal, and on the platform under the statue. The landscapes are where this gets opinionated. For Petra, most people who hold this rule mean the Treasury, which keeps it in. A stricter version asks for the Monastery too. For the Great Wall, any authentic original section usually passes. What fails is a rebuilt tourist replica, or glimpsing the wall from a train. Under the ordinary version of this rule our traveller is still at 4. Under the strict version, Petra drops and they are at 3.

One trip, and a completed list can read 5, 4 or 3 depending on the rule. As with counting countries and counting capitals, there is no correct rule. There is only one you picked and wrote down, so next year's count uses the same one.

How MapMyWorld decides

The app has an achievement for this list, called Wonder Seeker. Its seven points are fixed coordinates, one per wonder, in server/seeds/achievements.ts. The check is in server/services/achievementService.ts and is simple. A wonder counts as seen if any place in your record marked as visited or lived is within 50 kilometres of that wonder's point.

That is looser than any of the three rules above. It measures being in the area, not seeing the thing:

• Rome counts for the Colosseum. Ostia and Tivoli are both within about 27 km of the point, so a day by the sea near Rome counts too.
• Valladolid counts for Chichén Itzá. It is about 38 km away. Cancún, about 186 km away, does not.
• The Great Wall point sits at Mutianyu. Badaling is about 47 km from it, so it counts, just. Jinshanling and Simatai are about 63 km away and do not. A place pinned on Tiananmen Square is about 60 km away and does not count either, which is correct. A visit to the wall's western end at Jiayuguan, around 1,560 km away, gets no credit at all, even though it is unambiguously the Great Wall.
• Cusco does not count for Machu Picchu. It is about 75 km from the citadel in a straight line. Aguas Calientes and Ollantaytambo do count.
• Agra, Wadi Musa and most of Rio all fall inside the radius for their wonders.

(These distances are straight-line, from the coordinates in the code to each town's centre, so treat them as close rather than exact.)

We chose a radius on purpose. Most people log the city or the hotel, not a pin on the Colosseum's exact centre. A tight radius would fail anyone who logged "Agra" rather than "Taj Mahal", and a record that punishes normal logging is a record people stop keeping. The cost is that the achievement will credit you with a wonder you only drove near. If you hold yourself to Rule 2 or Rule 3, the badge is a floor to check against, not a verdict.

Where this falls short

A few things you should know before relying on it.

• The progress counter reads 0 / 7 until you finish. The server stores the list of wonders you have reached, and the Achievements page looks for that list under a different field name. So the progress bar and label show nothing until all seven are done, and then the badge unlocks. The underlying check is correct and the display is not. This is a bug on our side, and until it is fixed the counter is not a reliable guide to partial progress.
• One point per wonder. The Great Wall is a single coordinate. Whole regions where the wall runs, from Gansu to Hebei, are outside the circle.
• Places, not airports or trips. Only saved places are checked. An airport on its own does not count, and neither does a trip destination with no place attached.
• The Pyramids of Giza are not in the set. The honorary eighth is left out, matching the official seven. You can still log Giza as an ordinary place.
• The Free plan holds five places, and they are a lifetime allowance. Seven wonders need seven places, and deleting one does not free a slot. So the badge is out of reach on Free. Pro removes the limit, at $7.99 a month, $59.99 a year or $199.99 once.

How to settle your own number

1. Pick one of the three rules and write it in a note. One sentence is enough: "Counts if I went through the gate."
2. Log each wonder as its own place, named for the monument rather than the city, with the date you went. If you were only in the city, log the city and do not claim the wonder under a stricter rule.
3. Use the place notes for the edge cases. "Treasury only, didn't reach the Monastery." "Badaling section." "Saw it from the street." Your future self will want to know why the count is what it is.
4. Read the badge as a cross-check. If Wonder Seeker says you have been near a wonder you do not remember, look at which place triggered it. That is usually a sign of a gap in your record, or a place logged in the wrong spot.

The short version

The New Seven Wonders are a 2007 public vote, not an official designation, so no one else will define "seen it" for you. Choose between in sight, through the gate, and the defining part, and write the choice down. MapMyWorld's own rule is being within 50 km of each wonder. That is generous on purpose, it cannot see a wall 1,500 km from its one pin, and its progress counter is wrong until you finish. The number is only worth keeping if you know how you arrived at it.