Before Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, engulfed in flames on Monday, several heritage sites around the world have been either completely or partially destroyed by fires. Here are some examples.
Brazil’s National Museum
Overnight Sept. 2-3, 2018, Brazil’s National Museum, north of Rio de Janeiro, was ravaged by a massive fire.
Latin America’s largest natural history and anthropology museum held more than 20 million artifacts and 530,000 titles.
The museum was particularly reputed for the richness of its paleontology department with more than 26,000 fossils, including a dinosaur skeleton discovered in Brazil’s central Minas Gerais.
Several specimen of species that disappeared in the blaze included giant sloths and sabre-toothed tigers.
Venice opera house
In 1996, Venice’s celebrated opera house La Fenice was gutted by fire.With its near-perfect acoustics, La Fenice, opened in 1792, was one of the most beautiful opera houses in the world and one of the most famous in the history of opera.
Two electricians were sentenced to six and seven years in prison on negligence charges.
It reopened in 2004.
Barcelona opera house
In 1994, the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona’s world-famous opera house was destroyed by fire.
One of Spain’s cultural jewels, the 150-year-old theater was gutted in a blaze in which only the foyer and the horseshoe arch over the auditorium were left standing. It has since been reconstructed.
Windsor Castle
A major fire at Windsor Castle, west of London, on Nov. 20, 1992, destroyed the northeastern part of the royal site, the queen’s weekend residence.
Nine of the rooms were left unrecognizable by the fire, which started in the former Chapel Royal when a lighting projector too close to a curtain started the blaze during routine maintenance work.
It took 250 firefighters working 15 hours and pumping more than 6.5 million liters (1.6 million gallons) of water to bring the blaze under control.
The Castle reopened to the public in 1997 after five years of restoration.
Bosnia’s National Library
Bosnia’s 19th century National Library was destroyed in the war-time siege of the city of Sarajevo, overnight on 25-26 Aug. 1992.
It had housed some two million books, old scripts, photographs and transcripts before it was shelled by Serb forces who kept Sarajevo under a three-and-a-half-year long siege.
Only some 10% of its resources were saved from the resulting fire.
Reconstruction works, part-financed by the European Union, began in 1996 and the new library was inaugurated in 2014.
Geneva’s Grand Theater
In 1951, the Grand Theater of Geneva in Switzerland, built in the 19th century, was devastated in a fire that began during the preparation for a performance of Richard Wagner’s “The Valkyrie.”
It reopened in 1962.
