We’ll take a tour of Trollstigen², starting at the bottom where we can see several sections of the road climbing the mountain side.

With very narrow sections, eleven hairpin bends, and an average gradient of 9%, the road could fairly be described as challenging, and long buses and trucks are not allowed on it. The road is also closed by snow for several months of the year.

As we approach the first hairpin, we can see one of the waterfalls that feed the mountain stream which courses through the valley behind us.

By the fourth hairpin we’re starting to rise above the treeline and a second waterfall comes into view.

As we continue upwards we approach a stone bridge with a small parking area for people to admire the waterfall, though for some people the Street View car was apparently more interesting!

While some sections of the road have been widened, others are still very narrow, but the threat of oncoming traffic hasn’t stopped these intrepic cyclists from tackling the ascent.

By the seventh hairpin we start to get glimpses of the views awaiting from the top.³

At the penultimate turn, we can see the road below, and the full majesty of one waterfall …

… while the other cascades right next to us.

At the final hairpin we can see patches of snow on the mountainside across the valley, and the full view of the valley in the embedded Street View at the start of this post.

No more hairpins await us, but the road continues upwards through an increasingly barren landscape.

As we approach the top of the climb there is a parking area, a visitors centre and viewing platform that allows tourists to take in the scenery. While there’s currently a small range of stuff to buy⁴, there’s actually a new facility under construction which should better cater to the needs to the thousands of people who travel the Trollstigen each year.

After passing this curious monument, the road continues south through a landscape considered (by all except perhaps the most fastidious of virtual tourists), every bit as spectacular as that which we saw on the way up.

Wikipedia has a brief article about Trollstigen, but there’s more detail at the Norway tourism website. Or you can watch a motorcycle tour of the road on YouTube.

Locations: Norway / Categories: Natural Landmarks, Street Views

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We first visited this Santa three years ago but updated Street View imagery gives us a much better look at the bright red 12m tall Saint Nick who is in the process of making his list, and checking it twice. This blog post gives a fascinating glimpse at its origins in Seattle.

Heading to Oxnard, California, we find only the top-half of a Santa who has apparently got a bad headache, judging by the hand position and big frown on his face. Maybe all the cookies, milk and glasses of whisky were too much for him? As vigilant as ever, Google has blurred the faces of the accompanying nutcrackers to protect their identities.

This 6m tall Kris Kringle is actually quite a venerable specimen, having spent 50 years on the top of a candy store before being moved to his current location eight years ago. Read the full story in this blog post or this LA Times article, which includes a slideshow.

The state of Indiana seems to have a particularly fondness for Santa Claus. We first visited the town that bears his name back in 2008, but neglected to show the large statue that sits outside the town hall, surrounded by festive red benches.

Two separate can be spotted (one standing, one sitting) outside a hotel, while on the outskirts of town is a much older statue; in fact it is claimed to be the oldest Santa statue in the world.

It dates to 1935, shortly after the town’s residents realised they lived in a locale with a name that could be exploited for commercial gain. Originally thought to be 7 metres of solid granite, time and weathering have revealed that it is in fact made of concrete! Unfortunately it is too far from the road for early Street Views to give a good view.

Not quite so blurry is the 11m tall Father Christmas found an hour’s drive to the west in Haubstadt.

Roadside America reports that the surrounding derelict buildings have been demolished, leading to fears that this Santa may disappear before too long.

Many businesses adorn their premises with statues of Santa, though generally they’re not quite as disturbing as this one in Fresno, California.

Finally, just to prove that it’s not just the US that has giant Santa statues, in Lyngen, Norway, a large Julenissen² overlooks the harbour.

If you know of any other giant Santa statues please post them in the comments.

Merry Christmas from all of us at Google Sightseeing!

Locations: Alaska, California, Indiana, Norway /

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While it may look as though 8 large trailers have plummeted nose-first from the sky, they were in fact carefully placed by Frank Bates, who happens to own a nearby RV dealership. Google’s 45-degree imagery gives us a great look at the installation from the air.

This blog post has good images and information about the trailers, and the official website has a bunch of links and a documentary video. The neighbours are less than impressed with this apparent advertising ploy, but Bates is insistent that it is a true piece of art¹ inspired by his visit to Cadillac Ranch in Texas

We visited Cadillac Ranch back in the early days of this site. The satellite imagery hasn’t improved, and while there is now a Street View, it’s sadly from the very early low-resolution systems.

We visited Carhenge – another well-known car sculpture – in our Monumental Wannabes post last year. If you have a few hundred thousand dollars to spare apparently it’s now for sale.

We switch modes of transport briefly for a visit to a monument in Santa Rosa, California, that at first glance appears to be a fuzzy obelisk.

Closer observation reveals that it’s actually constructed of bicycle frames – three hundred and forty of them (and one tricycle) according this Wired article. Created by Mark Grieve and Ilana Spector the sculpture is named Cyclisk and stands almost 20m tall.

Google’s newly-released Street View imagery of Belgium allows us to see another bicycle sculpture in the town of Brakel, which is on the route of the Tour of Flanders spring classic race.

Returning to car art, we move to Sydney, Australia, where a large rock appears to have played a key role in a terrible accident involving a red Ford Festiva.

This is actually a sculpture named Still Life With Stone and Car, by artist Jimmie Durham, and it was created through the relatively simple process of, um… dropping a large rock on a car.

Originally placed near the Opera House, the sculpture was later moved to its current location where a pair of signs help dissuade any unknowing passers-by from calling the police to report the accident.

Sadly, this kind of cruel vehicular torture isn’t isolated – in 2009 we visited two places where cars have been impaled in the name of art.

In Toronto this car appears to have been abandoned for so long that it has been reclaimed by nature.

Commonly known as The Garden Car, it is more officially called the Community Vehicular Reclamation Project. More details can be found in this blog post.

Perhaps the most bizarre vehicular artwork can be found in rural Vermont, in the form of a large concrete gorilla holding aloft a Volkswagen Beetle.

The story behind its creation can be found at Roadside America.

To wrap up, a few artworks about which I haven’t been able to find much information. First, another Airstream trailer which has been converted into a spaceship in a park in Sacramento, California.

In Albuquerque an old Chevrolet has been tiled for some reason, and mounted on top of an arch.

And finally, in Geldrop, the Netherlands, a tiny old Fiat 500 has been bronzed and topped with a statue of a girl – the work of artist Carla Rump.

If you know of any other vehicular art, please post it in the comments. I’d particularly be interested to know if anyone from Stockholm knows if this bus-made-of-cars is visible on satellite or Street View. I really wanted to include it in this post but couldn’t find a precise location for it.

Locations: Australia, Belgium, California, Florida, Netherlands, New Mexico, Ontario, Texas, Vermont / Categories: Other Vehicles, Street Views, Structures, Weirdness

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Little Skellig is the smaller of the islands. It is closed to the public and is a important bird sanctuary, home to the world’s second-largest Northern Gannet colony.

Skellig Michael (Sceilig Mhichíl in Irish), or Michael’s Rock is also known as Great Skellig. In the 6th or 7th Century, monks settled here to set up a monastery, drawn by its isolation and remoteness. The only area flat enough to build a monastery was high up on the North peak.

© Copyright Arian Zwegers and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Access to the monastery is by climbing a stone stair consisting of approximately 650 steps, which rises to 180m above sea level, built entirely by the monks who lived here.

In 1826 two lighthouses were also built on the island. The upper lighthouse was closed in the 1870s, but the lower lighthouse remained open and permanently staffed by three men (and sometimes their families). On the 22nd of April 1987 the lighthouse became fully automated, and the doors were finally closed after 161 years.

During WWII a US Navy Consolidated PB4Y-1 Liberator struck a peak of the island and crashed into the sea. The plane was never been recovered and all hands were lost.

Skellig Michael is managed by the Office of Public Works (OPW) who issue thirteen licences to boat operators to allow them to bring visitors to the island. You can watch Alice Roberts from the BBC show Coast on her visit to Skellig, or if you’re feeling adventurous, more info on travelling to the island is available on WikiTravel.

Locations: Ireland / Categories: Abandoned, Buildings, Islands, Natural Landmarks, World Heritage Sites

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Above is Estadio Lluís Sitjar in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Built in 1945, for over half a century the 18,000 seat stadium was the home of football club RCD Mallorca. The stadium has sat unused since 2007, but the word ‘Mallorca‘ can still be plainly seen spelled out in the seats. The field of play, however, is already in a sad state.

On another populous Spanish island, Gran Canaria, lies Estadio Insular, which was the home of UD Las Palmas. Built in the same year as Lluís Sitjar, the 21,000 seater was abandoned four years earlier. Grass and trees are already rooting themselves in the stands, and the walls are covered in graffiti.

Stade des Charmilles in Geneva was the site of five FIFA World Cup games in 1954. Much of the facility was dismantled in 2002 and the field is completely barren, but the grandstands remain in place. In the rival city of Zurich, the demolished Hardturm also hosted World Cup games. Satellite imagery shows the shells of the grandstand are still intact, and Street View shows the rubble surrounding it.

In Germany, Gelsenkirchen’s Parkstadion was the home of the Bundesliga’s Schalke 04 from 1973 to 2001. Since then, about one-half of the seating has been removed, but the rest remains.

The largest abandoned stadium seen on Google Maps is the Estadio Fonte Nova in Salvador, Brazil. Originally built to a capacity of 66,080, the stadium was expanded to a monstrous 110,000 seats in 1971. Tragedy struck Fonte Nova in 2007, when an upper terrace collapsed during a Third Division championship final, killing seven spectators and injuring forty. The stadium was immediately closed. Since this imagery was captured, Fonte Nova has been demolished.

At one point the largest arena in the Czech Republic, Brno’s Stadion Za Lužánkami has sat in state for the past decade. Not only is the old playing field easy to make out, but even the goalposts are still standing. Around the edges, though, trees up to 3 metres high have sprouted in the bleachers.

Not all abandoned stadiums are left to rot. The Dell, the former home of English side Southampton, was redeveloped as a housing estate after its 2001 closure. Not only does the estate retain the shape of the original stadium, but all of the apartment blocks are named for famous Saints players.

Naturally, there aren’t only modern abandoned arenas to be found on Google Maps. The Plaza de Toros in Cartagena, Spain has been abandoned for nearly a century. Built on top of an ancient Roman arena, the location is set to be the home of a new Roman museum. Over in Merida, this ancient amphitheatre dates all the way back to 25 BC. The gladiator pit is exposed in the middle of the arena.

We end the first part of our tour in South Africa, where in Cape Town, Greenpoint Stadium was torn down to make way for the neighbouring Cape Town Stadium in advance of the 2010 World Cup¹. Here we see demolition crews working to dismantle the arena. The north grandstand, however, remains standing.

Read part two of our abandoned stadium tour: Abandoned Stadiums of the United States.

Locations: Brazil, Czech Republic, England, Germany, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland / Categories: Abandoned, Stadiums and Sport

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The new Olympic Stadium was completed earlier this year and has a capacity of around 80,000 spectators.

After the Olympics and Paralympics are over it will be converted to a football stadium for use by West Ham United who won the right to use it after a controversial court battle with other clubs. The track and field facilities will be retained and the stadium will host the 2017 World Athletics Championships.

The Olympic Zone will be the focal point of the Games and features a number of other new facilities including the Aquatics Centre, the velopark (which includes the velodrome and outdoor road and BMX circuits) and the basketball arena.

While it’s hard to find good Street View images, the elevated section of the A12 gives us a glimpse of the construction site. It reveals the swooping shape of the velodrome and the ridged roof of the basketball arena.

We also get a very distant view of the stadium and Aquatics Centre.

The Zone also includes a handball arena and two hockey stadiums in this area which is shown full of construction materials. A former greyhound racing facility may serve as the media centre for the Games.

The eastern side of the development features the Athletes’ Village – a number of accommodation buildings for the 10,000-plus athletes and their team officials. After the Games they will be taken over by the city of Stratford which is being extensively redeveloped.

Further south, the ‘River Zone’ will feature four venues along the Thames, including the O2 Arena¹, which will be used for gymnastics. The Excel Arena will house competition in seven sports including boxing, table tennis and judo. The historic Royal park in Greenwich will host all equestrian events while all shooting events will take place the Royal Artillery Barracks².

While a number of other pre-existing venues scattered across London will be used for various sports, in some cases the Games organisers are creating venues in non-traditional but iconic locations. For example, a temporary 15,000 seat beach volleyball stadium will be built in Horseguards Parade which normally plays host to the Trooping of the Colour.

The wide green expanse of Lord’s Cricket Ground will be converted to an archery venue with seating for close to 7,000 spectators.

There are several venues outside the city as well, including the Lee Valley White Water Centre which we see here under construction prior to its opening for canoe/kayak events a year ago.

For the past couple of Olympics, Google has released brand-new satellite and Street View imagery shortly before the Games, so we’ll plan to do a more detailed post next summer. If they can do Street View on the slopes at Whistler, I hope the next step forward is to strap a camera to a kayak and send it down the whitewater course!

Read more about the 2012 Olympic venues at Wikipedia and at the London 2012 site.

Locations: England / Categories: Buildings, Stadiums and Sport, Street Views, Structures

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Windsor

The English Windsor is about 40km west of London. Its Castle, shown above, is justly famous – built by William the Conqueror and still used regularly by the royal family, it is both the largest inhabited castle in the world, and the palace which has been occupied for the longest period of time. We visited it back in 2006.

It bears little resemblance to Windsor, Ontario, which is most often in the news for its dwindling number of car manufacturing plants, and its increasing number of casinos designed to draw American tourists across the border from Detroit.

Cornwall

Cornwall, in England’s far south-west, is a holiday-makers paradise, with pristine beaches, soaring cliffs and picturesque villages, and is of course home to Land’s End.

It would be hard to find any similarities with Cornwall, Ontario, which has a reputation as a rough-edged town polluted by industrial waste and popular with those wanting to smuggle cigarettes across the nearby US border.

One advantage of the toxic waste dumps is that they can apparently serve as ski hills in the winter!

Waterloo

Waterloo is a municipality in Belgium where the famous Battle of Waterloo saw Napoleon’s French army defeated in 1815. A large monument marks the battleground.

The only battle of note in Waterloo, Ontario, is the one for control of the smart-phone market, with Blackberry-manufacturer RIM being based here.

Athens

The Greek capital of Athens is often called ‘the cradle of Western civilisation’ It is home to countless historic buildings and treasures, and was the birthplace of the Olympic Games.

It bears little resemblance to Athens, Ontario, which is a small farming town of 3,000 people, seemingly most famous for its corn festival held every summer. It also has a number of pleasant murals of rural life.

Tweed

The River Tweed is a bucolic waterway in the Scottish borders region. It attracts anglers from all over the world for its renowned salmon fishing.

Tweed, Ontario, is mainly noted for its amusingly-decorated fire hydrants. It was also rumoured to be a hiding place for Elvis by those who believe his death was faked, although – surprisingly – no real evidence of this has ever surfaced.

Khartum

Khartoum is the bustling capital of Sudan, with a turbulent and often lawless history on the banks of the Nile. Recent development has been spurred by income from the country’s oil wells.

It could in no way be confused with Khartum, Ontario, which is, well … not much really. If anything it’s a ghost town. It is identified on the map and there are couple of roadside signs with the town’s name, but there’s nothing between the two signs that could really define it as a community. How it got the name, we have no idea!

If you have a favourite namesake, send it to us through our submission form and it might be included in a future post!

Locations: England, Greece, Ontario, Scotland, Sudan / Categories: Buildings, Monuments, Street Views, Weirdness

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Our tour begins not on a remote mountainside but in North Beach, an urban neighbourhood at the heart of San Francisco. Not only is San Francisco built on top of 50 different hills, it also lies in one of the world’s most seismically-active areas, meaning slumps and collapses are always an issue. Google’s 45° imagery captured the aftermath of a 2007 slide that came crashing down on several apartment buildings (and a strip club!).

Further down the California coast is the small village of La Conchita, where in 1995 a large mudslide slumped directly behind the town. In 2005, the southeastern portion of the slump collapsed, sending 200,000 m3 (7 million cu ft) of mud and soil into La Conchita, destroying 13 houses and killing 10 people.

In the Los Angeles neighbourhood of San Pedro, Paseo del Mar is a street that has been slowly eaten away from below by cliffs collapsing into the sea. A closer look reveals not only the pieces of the old roadway lying in the rubble, but also the foundations of buildings removed for safety purposes.

Halfway around the world in Crimea, we see where human activity has caused a landslide, as the side of a limestone quarry is falling into the Black Sea.

In 1903, much of the Albertan coal mining village of Frank was buried when the entire east face of Turtle Mountain suddenly collapsed, sending 90 million tonnes of rock into the Crowsnest River valley and killing 90 people. Over a century later, the scar is still as plain as day, and the Frank Slide is a major tourist attraction. The current highway through the valley was built right through the middle of the slide’s debris field.

The 1987 Val Pola landslide in the Italian Alps obliterated five villages and six hamlets. Heavy rainfall accelerated erosion on the mountainside, causing a large fracture on the east side of the mountain. Most of the valley’s residents were evacuated a day before the slip occurred, but what was not expected was the resulting rock avalanche ploughing into a nearby lake and sending a massive wave of water 2 km up the valley, killing 22 people.

Often, landslides and landslips falling into river valleys end up damming the rivers and creating new lakes. Two recent examples are Bolivia’s Laguna Verde, where the slope was destabilised by excessive coca farming, and Dominica’s Miracle Lake, created in 1997.

All of these slides serve to remind us that in the battle of man and nature, nature usually wins.

Locations: Alberta, Bolivia, California, Italy, Ukraine / Categories: Natural Landmarks

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At number ten the small town of Scary, West Virginia. Having the main street called Scary Road wasn’t frightening enough, so they named another street Big Scary Road!

At numbers nine and eight, we can just about make up the popular Halloween activity, by visiting Trickum Road and Treat Mountain Road, both in rural Georgia. Sadly they don’t intersect.

In the Netherlands we have a town named after a popular Halloween costume – Monster – which is number seven on our list. I’m not sure if it’s real graffiti, a real monster, or just an artifact of Google’s blurring efforts, but the town sign appears to have a ghoulish claw attached to the letter M!

Number six continues our monster theme. A touch of green face paint and a fake plastic bolt through the neck brings us to the tiny village of Frankenstein, Missouri.

Wikipedia claims that the town wasn’t actually named after Mary Shelley’s novel or its characters, but for a Gottfried Franken who donated land for the construction of a Church.

At number five we have one of the more popular decorations for Halloween parties – Spiderweb, South Carolina.

At numbers four and three we have a ghostly sound and a startled response – Boo, Sweden and Eek, Alaska.

Many children dress as pointy-hatted, wart-riddled old hags for Halloween, so (bending the rules slightly to include bodies of water as well as towns) at number two we have Witch Lake, Michigan.

We provide this handy graphic to help you understand how it got its name! Note the bonus Halloween content with Bat Lake just to the north-west!

No Halloween celebration would be complete without a gourd-like squash of the genus Cucurbita, carved into a gruesome face and lit from within by a candle. So tied for number one we have a pair of communities called Pumkpintown – one in South Carolina, the other in Tennessee.

Happy Halloween from all of us at Google Sightseeing! If you know of other Halloween-named towns, please post them in the comments.

Locations: Alaska, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, Netherlands, South Carolina, Sweden, Tennessee, West Virginia / Categories: Street Views, Weirdness

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The Lötschental (Lonza Valley) is the longest valley in Valais north of the Rhone River. The Lonza travels 27 km (17 mi) through a valley surrounded by peaks well over 3,000 metres.

The trike gives us great views of meadows on the slopes of hulking mountains such as the Breitlauihorn.

With the trike, we get to see places not accessible by car. Many alpine villages in Switzerland are only accessible by trail or tramway, such as Weissenried, a very traditional-looking hamlet comprised of chalets that are often centuries old.

The trike also navigates through larger¹ villages with some road access such as Blatten, but even here most of the houses and chalets are quite condensed. As the trail above Blatten climbs into the Firtwald forest, one gets an aerial view of Blatten.

At the north end of the Street View trike’s Lötschental journey is Tellistafel, where a small group of cabins are framed by the glaciers of the mountain known as the Tellihorn.

Crossing over the Nesthorn from the Lötschental, we enter the resort area of Belalp, another village accessible only by trail or tram. East of the main village, we get a close-up view of the Bruchegg ski lift.

Along the Belalp trail are numerous houses and chalets clinging to the mountainside hundreds of metres above the valley bottom.

At the east end of the Belalp trail, the journey ends at the Hotel Belalp, a luxury hotel and restaurant which dates back to 1906.

Next door to the hotel is the Church of Aletschbord. A quick turn to the right, and the view opens up toward the valley of the Massa River.

Both Belalp and the Lötschental lie at two ends of the largest glacier in the Alps, the 120 km2 (46 sq mi) Aletsch. At the top of the glacier is the Jungfraujoch ridge. At 3,471 m (11,388 ft), the ridegetop is accessible from the north side by a railway built entirely inside mountain tunnels, but those coming from Belalp and the Lötschental must hike the massive glacier² to reach the Jungfraujoch. At the top, a small observatory sits alone, from which visitors can enjoy a 360-degree panoramic view. Lush green valleys reach out to the north; a stark contrast to the massive Aletsch, whose icefields stretch into the horizon.

Locations: Switzerland / Categories: Buildings, Natural Landmarks, Street Views, World Heritage Sites

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