Two stunning and well-known locations in Australia and one in New Zealand have made it onto the shortlist for the global contest to select the new Seven Wonders of Nature – but sadly, not one place in Blighty has made the cut…
The natural landmarks of the Great Barrier Reef and Uluru (Ayres Rock) in Australia have been chosen as finalists from a long list of 77 worldwide hotspots competing to be named one of the new seven Wonders of Nature.
Twenty-eight finalists have been chosen via public voting from an original list of 441 nominees from 222 countries.
The New7Wonders of Nature competition is expecting to attract more than one billion votes from all over the world as voting draws to a close and the seven winners are announced in mid-2011.
Organiser Bernard Weber said, “This campaign should contribute to the appreciation – to the knowledge – of our environment and not just the one in our country but worldwide.
“If we or our children want to save anything, we should first appreciate it,” he added.
The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s biggest coral reef comprising more than 3,000 individual reef systems and beaches, whilst Uluru in the Northern Territory is the world’s largest monolith.
Over in New Zealand, the stunning Milford Sound – a fjord in the south west of the wild South Island, within Fiordland National Park and the Te Wahipounamu World Heritage site – was also named as a finalist.
These two natural icons are up against others including the Grand Canyon in the United States, the Amazon Rain Forest, Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro and Halong Bay in Vietnam.
The competition is similar to that for the seven Man-Made Wonders of the world chosen in 2007.
The winners then were the Colosseum, Italy; the Great Wall of China; the Taj Mahal, India; Petra, Jordan; the Christ the Redeemer Statue, Brazil; Machu Picchu, Peru; and the Pyramid at Chichen Itza, Mexico.
The full list of finalists in the New7Wonders of Nature is as follows:
Amazon
Angel Falls, Venezuela
Bay of Fundy, Canada
Black Forest, Germany
Bu Tinah Shoals, UAE
Cliffs of Moher, Ireland
Dead Sea
El Yunque, Puerto Rico
Galapagos, Ecuador
Grand Canyon
Great Barrier Reef
Halong Bay, Vietnam
Iguazu Falls, Brazil/Argentina
Jeita Grotto, Lebanon
Jeju Island, South Korea
Kilimanjaro, Tanzania
Komodo, Indonesia
Maldives
Masurian Lake District, Poland
Matterhorn/Cervino, Switzerland/Italy
Milford Sound
Mud Volcanoes, Azerbaijan
Puerto Princesa Underground River, Philippines
Sundarbans, India/Bangladesh
Table Mountain, South Africa
Uluru, Australia
Vesuvius, Italy
Yushan, Chinese Taipei
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