The Most Overrated Tourist Traps on Earth

Nobody connected this boulder to the Pilgrims until 1741, when 94-year-old Thomas Faunce pointed it out, 121 years after the landing it supposedly marks. It broke in half being hauled through town in 1774, and roughly a third of the original survives. You look down through a granite portico at a lump of stone wearing the date 1620, carved into it in 1880 to settle the matter.

Fifty-five and a half centimeters of bronze, and the one on the corner of the Rue de l'Étuve is not the original: a replica has stood there since 1965 while the real fountain sits in the Brussels City Museum. People arrive, angle a phone downward, and leave inside a minute. The wardrobe of roughly a thousand costumes is the better story, and it is kept indoors.

Berlin's best-known Cold War crossing took its name from nothing grander than the letter C in the NATO phonetic alphabet. The American guard house came out in 1990 and now sits in the Allied Museum's open-air display in Zehlendorf. A copy went up later on roughly the same spot, with a reconstructed sign and, for years, actors in military-police costume charging for photographs.

Reaching the front of the queue buys you about 30 seconds. Leonardo's portrait sits in a purpose-built, climate-controlled enclosure behind bulletproof glass, with a bank of raised phones between you and the surface of it. The theft of 21 August 1911 did as much for the crowd as the brushwork ever did, and the crowd is now what you go through to get your half-minute.

Set into a castle tower in 1446, this block of limestone picked up its gift-of-eloquence reputation a long time afterwards, and William Henry Hurlbert wrote in 1888 that the legend looked less than a hundred years old. Kissing it means lying back over the edge of the parapet, gripping the wrought-iron guide rails while somebody holds your legs. The stair up takes longer than the ritual.

At 1.25 meters and 175 kilograms, she is smaller than most of the people photographing her. Carl Jacobsen commissioned the statue in 1909, Edvard Eriksen's version was unveiled on 23 August 1913, and it has been beheaded twice since, in 1964 and again in 1998. What you walk the Langelinie promenade to reach is a modest bronze on a rock at the water's edge.

A star costs money. The Chamber of Commerce collects $85,000 from each new honoree's sponsor as of 2026, half of it spent making and installing the thing. On the ground you get coral-pink terrazzo rimmed with brass, set into a sidewalk running fifteen blocks of Hollywood Boulevard, and you spend the visit looking down while stepping around other people looking down.

Advertising here is not a side effect. Zoning ordinances have required building owners to display illuminated signs since 1987, and no other district in New York City carries that rule. Longacre Square took its current name in 1904, when The New York Times moved its headquarters in. Traffic lanes on Broadway between 42nd and 47th were de-mapped from Memorial Day 2009 and turned into pedestrian plazas, which is why you can now stand still in the middle of it.

Working boats built the name and then left it behind: the fishing docks declined through the 1960s and 1970s as tourist development took over the waterfront. What sits there now is a shopping district with a Ripley's museum and the Musée Mécanique. The best thing on the water arrived by accident, when a sea lion colony took the floating docks at Pier 39 in 1989 and stayed.

Local open-container law permits alcohol on French Quarter streets, which is why the plastic go-cup gets passed over the bar and why you can drink your way along all twelve blocks from Canal Street to Esplanade Avenue. Mayor Moon Landrieu made the strip a pedestrian mall after taking office in 1970, chasing tourism, and it has been running that errand ever since.

Before it was a promenade it was a drain, a sewage-filled stream diverted outside the new walls in 1440 and gradually turned into a street. It runs 1.2 kilometers, and somewhere along the middle of it you walk straight over Joan Miró's 1971 pavement mosaic at the Pla de l'Os without noticing, because everyone around you is reading menu boards instead.

You cannot get near the stones, and have not been able to since 1977, when they were roped off after serious erosion, so the visit is a loop on a path at a polite distance. The sarsen circle went up between 2600 and 2400 BC, and three of the sarsens were re-erected and set in concrete bases in 1958. The stones earn the billing; the approach from the visitor center, opened in December 2013, is where the day goes.

Gutzon Borglum worked the granite from 1927 to 1941 and stopped at four 60-foot heads. The plan had been to carve the figures down to the waist, and the funding ran out. The Treaty of Fort Laramie granted these hills to the Lakota in perpetuity in 1868, and the United States took the area back after the Great Sioux War of 1876. Four faces, no torsos, and the photograph you already had before you arrived.

About €3,000 a day lands in the water and goes on to Caritas, which puts the coin-throwing somewhere between a ritual and a collection plate. Nicola Salvi's design was completed by Giuseppe Pannini in 1762, and at 26.3 meters high it is the largest Baroque fountain in Rome, which you will be photographing over a wall of shoulders.

Sinking began in 1178, once building had reached the second floor on a three-meter foundation in unstable subsoil. By 1990 the tilt had reached 5.5 degrees; work between 1993 and 2001 brought it back to 3.97, so the thing people queue for was deliberately reduced. The lawn of visitors posing to hold it up is the trap. Climb the steps to the top, 296 of them or 294 by one staircase, and the floor tips underfoot.