Dniproges Dam

Here's a quick quiz. What's missing from the following list? The Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building, the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, the Alaska Highway… Perhaps the Sydney Opera House? Nope. Try again. Apparently, until 2007, when the list was refreshed, the seventh declared wonder of the modern world was Zaporizhzhya's Dniproges Dam.

At 760m - two and a half times longer than the famous Hoover Dam - the wall of the USSR's first dam certainly represented a monumental engineering feat when constructed under US supervision in 1927-32. In some ways, it's still impressive, but it's not especially tall and you have to reflect that its concrete walls, stained by years of local pollution, are really rather less appealing than the Sydney Opera House. Little known in the West, it was not considered for inclusion on the 'New Seven Wonders' list unveiled in 2007.