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Venice: A city floating on an underwater forest
Since 421 AD, the city of Venice has stood on billions of wooden stilts. The entire city is built not of steel or concrete, but mainly of alder wood and some oak.
These wooden stilts have become as hard as stone when exposed to salt water. 100,000 wooden stilts were used to build St. Mark's Campanile alone, and over a million stilts were used to build the enormous Basilica della Salute! Skilled builders of the time buried them in the seabed to create a wondrous 'submerged forest'.
The structure extends to a depth of almost three meters, where the stilts are placed at intervals of half a meter. This extraordinary medieval engineering feat, 1.6 meters below the water level, still holds Venice firmly in place after 1,500 years, making it one of the most amazing cities in the world.
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