The shopping mall is considered a symbol of American consumerism and the US is indeed home to over 100,000 shopping malls, but the title of world’s biggest shopping mall actually belongs to one of America’s biggest rivals, Iran. Located northeast of Teheran, the humongous Iran Mall shopping mall covers an area of 31 square meters and consists of seven floors, but its entire infrastructure area measures a whopping 1.35 million square meters and is set to expand to 1.60 million square meters. Since 2014, over 1,200 contractors and around 25,000 workers worked around the clock to make the world’s largest shopping mall a reality. In 2018, the first phase of construction was completed, and 267,000 square meters of gross leasable area and 708 retail units were opened on 1 May 2018. That same year, Iran Mall set a Guinness record for the world’s longest continuous pour of concrete, with tons of concrete pouring continuously for 6 consecutive days. Read More »

The Zhuhai Chimelong Marine Science Park in Zhuhai, China, is famous both for its impressive offering of rare marine wildlife from all over the world and its sci-fi-inspired design. Announced in 2015, the Zhuhai Chimelong Marine Science Park immediately captured people’s imaginations with its futuristic design reminiscent of alien motherships depicted in sci-fi flicks and video games. Described as the largest indoor marine science park in the world, with more than 100,000 marine animals of around 300 species, as well as 100 kinds of living coral split into 10 themed areas. Originally scheduled to open in 2021, after ten years of planning and just over 5 years of actual construction, the giant marine science park only opened its gates to the public this month. Read More »

A Brazilian adventure firm is offering thrillseekers the unique opportunity to enjoy a picnic at a wooden table suspended above the thundering Cascata da Sepultura, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The breathtaking experience recently went viral thanks to a short clip posted by an American couple who found it while looking for special things to try in Brazil. In the video, Christianna Hurt and her rapper boyfriend ‘OnPointLikeOp’ can be seen casually enjoying some snacks and a glass of red wine at a picnic table suspended on a bunch of metal wires high above Cascata da Sepultura. The whole experience apparently lasts only 15 minutes and costs $450, but it’s definitely something you’ll never forget. Read More »

Tucked away on the sixth floor of a Nanjing shopping mall is one of the fanciest, most impressive public bathrooms in the world. To some, it is the world’s most beautiful public bathroom. Designed by X+Living, a Shanghai-based architecture firm, the bathroom on the sixth floor of the Deji Plaza shopping mall in Nanjing, China makes you feel like you accidentally walked into a whimsical palace. That’s not usually the feeling you get from most public bathrooms… It starts out with a long corridor lined with plants coming out of the walls. This part of the bathroom was designed as “an immersive walk-through-a-garden experience”, but it’s hard to focus on the green decor with dozens of giant lamps shining on you from above, and with the light reflecting on the glossy floor. Read More »

Located in an abandoned mine, 419 meters under the mountains of Snowdonia in Wales, the ‘Deep Sleep’ hotel is the world’s deepest hotel. Comprised of four private twin-bed cabins and a grotto room with a double bed, a dining area, and toilet facilities, Deep Sleep is a hotel unlike any other. Set deep within a section of the abandoned Cwmorthin slate mine, 1,375 feet (419 meters) underground, it is being advertised as the deepest hotel in the world. If that sounds like the kind of place you’d actually want to spend the night, know that you’ll not only have to pay up to £550 ($688) per night, and traverse a ‘steep and challenging’ route through the old mine shafts to reach it. Read More »

Stott Hall Farm is the only farm in the world built right in the middle of a busy motorway, with crash barriers and a fence around it to keep livestock in and out-of-control vehicles out. The M62 motorway connecting the cities of Liverpool and Hull in Northern England is famous for having an inhabited farm right in the middle of its roadways in Calderdale.  The unique farm is one of the ten best-known sights on the UK motorway network, and there are various stories and myths about its existence, the most popular of which claim that the motorway was split because the owners, Ken and Beth Wild, refused to sell. These stories would have you believe that Stott Hall Farm is essentially a ‘nail house’ the likes of which we’ve featured several times in the past. However, the reality of this infrastructural oddity is very different.

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High up in the Swiss Alps, at an altitude of almost 3,500 meters (11,332 feet), lies Jungfraujoch, Europe’s highest train station, a wonder of human engineering that has been around for over a century. The train doesn’t seem like the best means of transportation when trying to climb a mountain, but the Swiss would beg to differ, and they have proof to back up their claims. At the end of the 19th century, they began work on a project unlike any other – the Jungfraubahn, a steep railway through the Bernese Alps all the way to the ‘top of Europe’. And, at the end of the Jungfraubahn railway, they built Jungfraujoch, a spectacular train station perched on a rock between the Jungfrau and Mönch mountains, both of which soar over 4,000 meters. Today, Jungfraujoch is officially recognized as the highest train station in Europe and is one of Switzerland’s most popular tourist attractions. Read More »

A mountainous river valley in China’s Hubei province is home to one of the Asian country’s most impressive pieces of infrastructure – a highway bridge that runs through the middle of a river. Finalized in 2015, China’s ‘river highway’ is widely regarded as an infrastructural wonder.  Designed to link the town of Gufuzhen in Xingshan county to the main highway running between Shanghai and Chengdu in southwestern China, this unique suspended highway doesn’t make much sense at first glance. Why have a massive bridge built in the middle of the Xiangxi River, when you could just have it run alongside it, on land? In fact, there was already a road running along the river, which meant it could obviously be done, so why not build the highway that way? Well, apparently, Chinese engineers decided that a suspended highway running along the middle of the river was not only cheaper to build, but more efficient. Read More »

Covering an area as big as five football fields and selling over 100,000 products in 25 different departments, Gekås Ullared is not only the largest department store in the world, but Sweden’s most popular tourist attraction by a large margin. Ullared, a small, unassuming town in the south of Sweden is home to about 800 people, according to the country’s most recent census. It’s really not the most beautiful place to visit in the Scandinavian country, and yet thousands of people from all over the world flock to Ullared every single day. It’s all because of Gekås Ullared the world-famous department store founded in 1963 by entrepreneur Göran Karlsson, which currently holds the record for the largest department store in the world. It has a total of 2,000 employees and can accommodate up to 5,500 shoppers at the same time. Read More »

A chamber inside Microsoft’s Audio Lab holds the Guinness record for the world’s quietest room. It’s a strange place that reportedly causes people to start hallucinating. With everything moving at such a crazy pace in this day in age, we all crave a little peace and quiet from time to time, but it seems absolute quiet is absolutely terrifying. Luckily, it’s something you don’t have to experience, unless you want to challenge yourself because the only place you can experience total silence is in an anechoic chamber. There are only a few of them in the whole world and the absolute quietest of them all is inside the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Virginia. Rated at -20.35 dBA, this room stops all outside noise, making any sound produced inside sound downright eerie. Read More »

The ancient ruins of Baiae, near the modern city of Bacoli, in Italy are home to a botanical oddity known as the upside-down fig tree. Looking at the tenacious tree growing out of the ceiling of an ancient Roman archway, it’s easy to see why it’s called the upside-down tree. It is literally inverted, growing toward the ground, which is quite rare. No one knows exactly how the fig tree ended up there, or how long it has been growing for, but one thing is for sure –  despite its bizarre location, the fig tree if Baia is growing stronger every year, and sometimes it even bears fruit. Read More »

The small Australian town of Helensburgh is home to one of the most amazing places on the planet – an abandoned railway tunnel that glows an eerie blue at night. The Helensburgh Glow Worm Tunnel is an abandoned rail tunnel in Helensburgh, New South Wales which has become famous both for the ghost stories surrounding it and the glow worm colony that give it its iconic bioluminescent blue glow. Originally known as the Metropolitan tunnel, the 624-meter-long underground passage was inaugurated at the end of the 19th century and used to transport coal from the local mine to the suburbs. However, it closed down a couple of decades later and remained abandoned until the mid-90s, enough time for a colony of glow worms to claim it for themselves… Read More »

Admont Abbey, a Baroque monastery in Austria, hosts the world’s largest monastic library, which also happens to be a stunning work of art. Dating back to the year 1074 when the Benedictine monks of Salzburg decided to found their own abbey in the town of Admont, Admont Abbey is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the region of Styria. And while the entire monastic complex is impressive, the 70-meter-long library is undoubtedly the abbey’s main attraction. Featuring flamboyant ceiling frescoes, wooden sculptures, gold busts, gilded bookshelves, and no less than seven frescoes-decorated cupolas, this is definitely one of the world’s most beautiful libraries. Read More »

The Greek Island of Ikaria in the Aegean Sea is home to numerous camouflaged houses built under giant rocks to make them harder to spot by pirates. Nowadays, Ikaria is a popular tourist destination famous for its sandy beaches, picturesque villages and pristine natural landscape. But it wasn’t always the slice of paradise it is today. Hundreds of years ago, Ikaria was a prime target for the pirates who called the Aegean their home, so to protect themselves from their raids, the locals started building ‘anti-pirate’ homes deep into the mountains, to make their island look uninhabited from the sea. At one point, the entire population of Ikaria concealed itself in rock houses that didn’t attract attention unless you literally walked past them. Read More »

Hum is a picturesque hilltop settlement in Croatia’s Istria region whose main call to fame is being the smallest town in the world. Located in central Istria, approximately a 2.5 hours drive from Croatia’s capital city of Zagreb, the medieval hilltop town of Hum is home to between 20 and 30 people (21 according to the 2011 national census, and 27 as of 2021). Its origins are shrouded in mystery, but its first mention in historical documents dates back to the year 1102, when it was called Cholm. A bell and watch tower was built in 1552 as part of the town’s defenses, and guards and their families started moving in, but the town never really developed over the centuries, and even today it consists of just three neat rows of medieval houses and two streets. Read More »