Google Includes Monemvasia Among its 8 ‘Most Loved’ Street View Images

Photo source: Google Street View

The Greek town of Monemvasia is included among Google’s eight “most loved” images of its Street View service.

Google shared its “8 Street View images we love” list to celebrate Street View’s 15th birthday on May 29.

Monemvasia is located in Lakonia on a small island off the east coast of the Peloponnese. It is linked to the mainland by a short causeway and features an imposing medieval fortress, the town walls and many Byzantine churches.

“Monemvasia is a Greek town whose name is derived from two Greek words meaning ‘single entry’. Fittingly, there is only one way into this rock fortress,” Google says.

Apart from Monemvasia, Google’s “8 Street View images we love” list also includes the Ambrym Volcano Marum Crater in New Zealand; the Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland; Petra in Jordan; the Mihara-yama active volvano in Japan; NASA’s International Space Station; the sea lions off the shore of the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific ocean; and a street view image of a horse eating a banana on the side of the road in Canada!

Google: Popular Street View images in Greece

Google also released the most popular Street View images in Greece in terms of destinations, museums/sites and beaches.

Most popular images of Greek destinations:

1. the Acropolis in Athens,
2. Meteora in Thessaly
3. the Parthenon (Acropolis)
4. Colossus of Rhodes
5. the Aghia Sofia church in Thessaloniki.

© Acropolis Museum / Giorgos Vitsaropoulos

Most popular images of Greek museums/sites:

1. the Ancient Agora in Athens
2. the National Archaeological Museum
3. the Acropolis Museum
4. the Sounio archaeological site
5. the Georgios Averof naval museum.

Most popular images of Greek beaches:

1. Seitan Limania, Crete
2. Sarakiniko, Milos
3. Liapades, Corfu
4. Elli, Rhodes
5. Agathi, Rhodes

15 years of Google Street View

On May 29, 2007, Google published its first Street View images of San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver.

Since then, Street View cars equipped with cameras have captured and shared more than 220 billion Street View images and mapped 10 million miles — the equivalent of circling the globe more than 400 times.

Google has also captured Street View imagery inside cultural landmarks, high up in space and deep under the ocean.

More popular places to visit on Street View

To celebrate Street View’s 15th birthday, Google released its “8 Street View images we love” list and two more:

• The three most popular places to explore on Street View: Burj Khalifa in the United Arab Emirates; Eiffel Tower in France; Taj Mahal in India.
• Street View excursions with four new collections including The Pyramids of Meroë in Sudan; the Duomo in Milan; Les Invalides in Paris; and the Sydney Ferries in Australia.

To help make exploring the world even easier, Google has launched the Street View Studio — a new platform with all the tools users need to publish 360 image sequences quickly and in bulk.