The best tourist attractions that no longer exist

The Pink and White Terraces of Lake Rotomahana were the world’s largest silica towers and the South Pacific’s biggest 19th-century attraction until a massive eruption at Mount Tarawera that momentous day blasted these natural wonders into oblivion.

Out of that same eruption, however, a new wonder of the world was born.

Waimangu Geyser roared into existence hurling black mud and sand some 1,500 feet (460 meters) into the sky, making it the most powerful geyser the world has ever seen.

This new attraction ignited a whirlwind of global interest in New Zealand’s volcanic North Island until it, too, vanished off the face of the earth in 1904 after a landslide changed the water table.

The Pink and White Terraces and Waimangu Geyser may be lost forever, but their impression on tourists of the time is well documented.

They are but two of many attractions of yesteryear that can now only be appreciated in the pages of a history book.

Here’s a look at 10 others.

Original Pennsylvania Station (New York)

The current Penn Station may be a charmless catacomb of labyrinthine low-ceiling hallways, but New York’s first Penn Station was a lavish masterpiece of the Beaux Arts style.

The original facility’s domed ceilings, soaring archways and handsome columns welcomed more than 100 million passengers each year during the station’s golden era in the mid-1940s.

But by the end of the 1950s, the dawn of the Jet Age and the birth of the Interstate Highway System took a heavy toll on visitor numbers.

Royal Opera House of Valletta (Malta)

Like the operas that brought its audiences to tears, the story of the Royal Opera House of Valletta is fittingly tragic.

Designed by Edward Middleton Barry in the 1860s, architect of the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden, it was the crowning jewel of Malta’s capital city for just six years before a fire gutted the interior.

It was resurrected from the flames four years later, but tragedy struck again during World War II when the Royal Opera House received a direct hit from an aerial bomb.

A few columns remain in place on the corner of Strada Reale, forming a backdrop for the open-air Royal Piazza Theatre, launched within the ruins of the Royal Opera House in 2013.

Jonah’s Tomb (Iraq)

Jonah’s Tomb in Mosul, Iraq, is the newest addition to this list and one of a series of attractions lost to war.

Militants with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, planted explosives in July 2014 around Mosul’s oldest mosque, which is traditionally held to be the burial place of Jonah the Prophet.

Jonah is a key figure in both Christianity and Islam who, according to Islamic and Judeo-Christian traditions, was swallowed by a whale.

His tomb was a popular place of pilgrimage and joins a growing list of holy sites deemed idolatrous under the puritanical strain of Islam practiced by ISIS.

Mark Johanson is an American travel and culture writer based in Santiago, Chile.

CNN