The Little Mermaid

She is 1.25 metres tall, weighs 175 kilograms, and has been the most vandalised statue in Scandinavia for over a century. The Little Mermaid was commissioned in 1909 by Carl Jacobsen — son of the Carlsberg brewery founder — after he attended a ballet performance of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale at the Royal Danish Theatre and became so besotted with the lead ballerina, Ellen Price, that he asked sculptor Edvard Eriksen to immortalise her. Price agreed to model her face but refused to pose nude, so Eriksen used his own wife Eline as the body model. The statue was unveiled on August 23, 1913.

Since then, the Little Mermaid has endured a catalogue of abuse that reads like a crime blotter. Her head has been sawn off twice — in 1964 and again in 1998. Her right arm was hacked off in 1984. She has been doused in paint at least ten times, in colours ranging from red to green to pink. In 2003, she was blown off her rock with explosives. In 1961, someone gave her a bra painted in red. Through it all, the Eriksen family has retained copyright over the statue and maintains the original moulds, allowing each severed limb and decapitation to be repaired with replacement bronze castings.

Despite being one of the most famous statues in the world, she is consistently ranked among the most disappointing tourist attractions in Europe, largely because visitors expect something grand and find instead a small bronze figure on a rock. But that smallness is the point. Andersen's original tale is not a Disney romance — it is a story about sacrifice, transformation, and dissolution into sea foam. The statue captures that melancholy perfectly.

In 2010, she made her first and only trip abroad, travelling to the Danish Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo. Copenhagen replaced her temporarily with a video screen showing a live feed from Shanghai. The Danes, characteristically, found this funnier than anyone else did.