They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and that’s probably meant in the same way people say that a bird pooping on you is good luck. Is it the same situation when someone makes a replica of something?
Generally, replicas aren’t pretending to be the real thing, they’re just very weird reproductions of a thing that exist out in the world, far from where they should be. Why? Because someone saw a thing and wanted to have the same thing for themselves. Go figure.
10. There’s a Giant, Fake Vatican in Africa
Félix Houphouët-Boigny was the President of the Ivory Coast in Africa from 1960 until he died in 1993. As you might suspect of a leader who spends 30 years in office, he was not exactly on the up and up in all things. On the one hand, he led his country into an unprecedented era of prosperity. On the other, that prosperity went to his head.
Houphouët-Boigny moved the capital city to his hometown of Yamoussoukro which was, at the time, a small village. To make it worthy of being the capital city he decided they needed to build a replica of the Vatican as the village’s new Megachurch. Construction started in 1985 and cost $300 million over 5 years. It ended up being the largest church in the world and a very close rip-off of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. The church asked the architect to make the dome just a little lower.
The church is still there today, of course, and it’s the largest church in the world. It covers 320,000 square feet, features a 100-pound gold cross, and has seating for over 7,000 with a capacity of 18,000. That said, a couple of hundred people are in the congregation.
While the former President is well regarded for much of what he did for his country, the church was very much considered a vain, egotistical misstep. Part of the Pope’s conditions for blessing the church included a promise that a hospital would be built next door. When the Pope came to do the blessing, the first stone was laid for the hospital at the same time. It’s still there, waiting for the rest of the hospital to be built.
9. Lots of People Knock Off Stonehenge
Any generic list of mysterious places around the world is going to include Stonehenge. Everyone loves Stonehenge! And while most of us have seen it, thought “Huh, weird” and moved on with life, others have been more enamored. So much so, in fact, that people keep rebuilding it all over the world.
Head to Virginia and you will find Foamhenge which is Stonehenge made of foam blocks, obviously. It’s a lifesize reproduction, but all the blocks are styrofoam and decidedly less hard to move around.
Nebraska took things a little more extreme than Virginia and much more modern than the real Stonehenge by making Carhenge. It’s old cars stacked and arranged to replicate the original, for Druids who liked American auto-making.
America has at least two dozen henges, in fact. Some are foam, some are trucks, but most are made of stones, rock, concrete, or similar materials that more closely mimic the originals. Why are there so many? The answer seems to boil down to: why not?
8. Several Homes Have Knocked Off the White House
The White House is arguably the most famous house in the world. It’s not a palace or anything, but it is a home and the President lives there. It’s been featured in so many movies and TV shows that people around the world can instantly recognize it. It’s so appealing to some of those people that more than one has thought of living in their own version and having a replica home built.
Having a White House isn’t cheap, of course. It’s a big house. One in California that came complete with an Oval Office was listed for sale at $38.9 million in 2023. It features 11 bedrooms, nine full bathrooms, and five half baths, so over a dozen people can use a toilet at the same time if that’s ever a concern of yours.
The home was originally redesigned for the son of publisher William Randolph Hearst though the property dated back to 1878 before it was turned into a White House.
Other White House clones can be found across the US in Virginia, California, Texas, and Georgia, as well as international versions in Austria, China, and Iraq.
7. There Are Many Fake Statues of Liberty Around the World
The Statue of Liberty is the unfortunate victim of monsters and natural disasters in several movies. If the Ghostbusters aren’t using her like an Uber, then Clovers are knocking her head across town or Independence Day aliens are just toppling her like she’s trash. Good thing the world is full of clones so we’ll never run out.
Most of us know the original Statue of Liberty was a gift from the French. America, proving it’s not great at gift-giving, gave the same thing back to France to mark the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. If you head to Paris, you can find it near the Eiffel Tower. Elsewhere in Europe, you can find a somewhat quirkier version of Miss Liberty on a museum in Ukraine, one in Norway and there’s even a Lego Liberty in Denmark.
Japan has a Statue of Liberty that was erected to commemorate the country’s relationship not with the USA but with France. There are also two other replicas of it in the country.
Brazil has a statue that has a real flaming torch, but it’s only 36 feet tall. Israel also has one that’s 15 feet tall, and no one knows where it came from. China has several knock-offs but one of the most impressive is atop the Tomb of the 72 Martyrs. It was placed there in 1920 and the entire monument is dedicated to 72 men who died in the revolution that ended China’s imperial era.
6. Nashville Has a Full-Scale Parthenon
The Parthenon was constructed nearly 2,500 years ago in Athens. At the top of the Acropolis, the Parthenon was built for the goddess Athena and was the most massive, grand temple ever built by the Greeks. 100,000 tons of marble was mined for a location 10 miles away to build the temple and its many columns and statues.
Fast forward over a couple thousand years and head to Nashville and you’ll find the second Parthenon. Built to scale, the Nashville Parthenon dates back to 1897 when it was built to commemorate Tennessee’s centennial. Nashville had been called the Athens of the South because it had a reputation as a place for learning so it made sense to people at the time.
The Nashville monument features seven-ton doors and a 42-foot statue of Athena covered in 8 lbs of gold leaf. Today it’s a tourist attraction and museum and you can check out their website to plan a visit any time you like.
5. Pepsi Once Built a Replica of the Simpsons House
If a TV show is around for long enough, certain parts of it apart from the characters and story become iconic. Think of the fountain in the opening credits of Friends. Few locations will ever achieve the instant notoriety of one of the most recognized and well-known homes in history: the Simpsons house. Although the layout is entirely inconsistent and some rooms appear and disappear as needed, most people instantly know the house at a glance.
In 1997, Pepsi had a replica of the house built for a raffle. The replica cost $120,000 to build and the result was a pretty reasonable facsimile of the cartoon home in real life. They dressed this thing to the nines and even included a fridge full of Duff beer, Bart’s treehouse in the yard, and a food dish for the cat. Doorways were heightened to allow for Marge’s hair.
In a fun twist, the local homeowner’s association hated the bright yellow and orange house and no one claimed the prize when the raffle number was drawn. The team had to resort to Plan B and the new winner lived in a place so rural they couldn’t get the limo to her house to tell her she’d won because the dirt road was so precarious. They gave her the option of the house or a cash prize and she took the cash.
The house has since been repainted in drab colors but if you go to Henderson, Nevada you can track it down if you have a keen eye for the one house that doesn’t quite fit in.
4. National Geographic Built the Up House
While people love to build replicas of things from pop culture, like the Batmobile or the Simpsons house, it’s a bit of an odd choice to build something most notable for the horrible thing that happened to it. Nevertheless, National Geographic built a replica of the house from Up, balloons and all, to see if they could make it fly. It did.
The house was not exactly a perfect replica – it weighed 2,000 pounds and was just 16×16. However, the team behind the experiment did manage to make it fly with the use of 300, eight-foot tall weather balloons filled with helium.
In the end, with balloons, the entire structure was 10 stories tall and reached 10,000 feet. There were even people on board, but no one got lost on another continent.
3. The Plum Island Pink House Is Said to Be a Spiteful Replica
Spite is a remarkable motivator sometimes. The Plum Island Pink House is an entire home rumored to have been built entirely out of spite by an angry husband during a divorce.
As the story goes, a couple in the 1920s was having an acrimonious divorce. The husband, as decreed in the divorce, was required to provide his now ex-wife with an exact replica of the home they had shared. The man lived up to his end of things but, here comes that spite part, he built it in a salt marsh that was uninhabitable because the order never said where he needed to build the house.
Apparently the home had been used as a summer house for several people over the decades but since the early 2000s, it’s been entirely abandoned and is now mostly a historical landmark.
A caveat to the story is that it may be wholly untrue. Like, every word of it. But there’s not enough detail available one way or the other for anyone to say with certainty so, for now, let’s just pretend it’s a genuine replica of a real house planted out in the middle of nowhere.
2. A $250 Million Mansion Came With a Replica of the Airwolf Helicopter
Did you ever see Airwolf? It’s peak ’80s action and was on TV from 1984 to 1986. Where Knight Rider was about a car, Airwolf was about a really cool helicopter. For reasons that may never be fully explained, a Bel Air mansion that was listed for $250 million in 2017 had a replica of the Airwolf chopper on the roof.
The helicopter came with the house, which is nice, but it was not real, which seems less impressive. It was lifesize, of course, it was just not functional. So, if you had the money to drop on the house, you got a big, fake helicopter from a 40-year-old TV show.
You may be surprised to learn that no one was enticed to buy. It wasn’t until two years later someone finally bought the place at the greatly discounted price of $94 million.
1. China Has Replicated Western Cities But No One Lives in Them
China has a complicated relationship with the West, but one thing they seem to both love and hate simultaneously is the cities of the West. Again and again, developers in China reproduce features found in cities like Paris, New York, and even Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and often nothing happens with them.
Tianducheng is the name of the Paris knock-off located in Hangzhou. It’s almost a ghost town with many empty apartments around its tiny version of the Eiffel Tower.
There are literally dozens of fake cities in China and many of them are not even well known. Hallstatt, Austria was rebuilt at a cost of nearly $1 billion. Yujiapu Financial District is a replica of Manhattan but was abandoned, only partially finished. Interlaken, Switzerland was rebuilt in Beijing and no one lives there now.
Most of the locations are maybe tourist traps but otherwise devoid of life almost entirely and it’s hard to understand what they might have been built for in the first place.