Eiffel Tower
Discover the iron tower that looks like a giant metal tree reaching up to touch the clouds in Paris!
Looking up from directly underneath the tower, showing the intricate iron lattice work and geometric patterns
The Eiffel Tower looks like a giant metal Christmas tree standing tall in the heart of Paris, France! This incredible iron tower is as tall as an 81-story building and was built by Gustave Eiffel for the 1889 World Fair. Many Parisians thought it was ugly at first, but now it's the most famous symbol of France and one of the most visited monuments in the world!
Caption: The Eiffel Tower at sunset with golden lights beginning to twinkle, showing people gathered in the park below for scale. Image Credit: Eugene Dorosh
The tower is made of 18,038 iron pieces held together by 2.5 million rivets - that's like giant metal puzzle pieces! It weighs as much as 1,000 elephants, but the iron is so cleverly designed with open spaces that if you melted it down, it would only fill the base in a pile 2 inches high. On hot summer days, the tower actually grows 6 inches taller because metal expands in heat!
Every evening, 20,000 golden light bulbs make the tower sparkle for 5 minutes every hour until midnight, creating a magical light show that tourists love to watch. You can ride elevators or climb 1,665 steps to reach the top, where you can see all of Paris spread out below like a beautiful map.
The Eiffel Tower proves that sometimes the most beautiful things come from bold engineering ideas that seem impossible at first!
