Wiki Loves Monuments isn’t your typical photography competition. For starters, it’s the world’s largest, as recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records. It’s also a platform for global collaboration in making beautiful, significant photos of monuments freely available to anyone, anywhere.

As part of the competition, photographers from around the world donate their images to Wikimedia Commons, the free repository that holds most of the images used on Wikipedia, to ensure that the world’s most visible cultural heritage is documented and held in trust for future generations.

This is a mission that only grows in importance each year, as our heritage is often under threat from human action or natural disasters — the latter already being exemplified in 2020 by the bushfires raging all across Australia, earthquakes in Puerto Rico, and volcano eruption in the Philippines.

The 2019 winners were announced today and are profiled below. They come from ten different countries, including multiples from Poland, Iran, the United States, and Thailand, and were selected from a group of national winners by an international jury of experts.

All told, the competition elicited 213,075 image submissions uploaded by 7,725 people.

For more information, including how to join next year’s contest, go to wikilovesmonuments.org. You can also share your favorite winning image on social media using #WikiLovesMonuments.