World's hottest tourist attractions - PHOTO

And a visit to Paris or Rome isn’t complete without a smartphone selfie in front of the Eiffel Tower or Spanish Steps respectively. But which tourist sights are the world’s most iconic?An interactive 'heat map' has revealed the top 10 photographed cities in the world - along with which tourist attraction is the most snapped in each location.Sightsmap reveals the ‘hotness’ of a location based on the number of photos taken of it on Google’s Panoramio, a location-based photo-sharing website.Panoramio lets people tag photos of landmarks or landscapes and upload them to Google Maps.The service asks users to organise images using geotags, such as Paris or Eiffel Tower, which enable searchers to find images of a destination or subject matter easily.Sightsmap - which was created in 2012 by Estonian computer science professor Tanel Tammet using Google Maps - allows users to search the map to find the top places in a given area, including the most photographed 1,000 locations in a country.Yellow spots on the map are those with the most number of geotagged images, followed by orange, pink and then purple.This makes it easy to pick out popular cities, holiday spots or attractions.Users can zoom in to see which were the most popular sights in a particular city. They can also directly view the heatmap of the city by using its name as a link, for example www.sightsmap.com/New_YorkNew York topped the most-photographed list but, surprisingly, the most photographed landmark wasn’t the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty but the city's Guggenheim Museum, which was designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright and houses works of art by Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin.Rome was in second place, with Trinità dei Monti - a Renaissance church at the top of the famous Spanish Steps - having the most lenses trained on it.In third place was Barcelona’s Park Güell, whose colourful sculptures by famed Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi make the perfect subject matter for holiday snaps.In fourth place, the Moulin Rouge pipped the Eiffel Tower to the post in Paris, while Istanbul’s Maiden’s Tower - which was built in the 12th century - rounded off the top five most photographed sights.Also in the top 10 were Venice’s Ponte dell’Accademia, which spans the city’s Grand Canal, and Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo in Monaco, which appeared in the James Bond film GoldenEye.In eight place was Florence’s Piazzale Michelangelo, which offers stunning views of the city followed by Caminito, a street in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that is lined with colourful buildings and artist’s stalls.St Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest, which is the largest church in the Hungarian capital. rounded off the top ten.No locations in the UK and Ireland made it into the top ten though London was unsurprisingly the most snapped location, followed by Dublin, Stonehenge, Brighton and Bath.Visit www.sightsmap.com to find out more.(dailymail.co.uk)ANN.Az