According to the Mountain View tech giant, more than 16 million kilometres have been covered in order to digitise roads, landscapes and other paths and walkways in three dimensions.

Street View is effectively a virtual window onto the world, except that, in this case, the top destinations aren’t always the same as those that attract the most travellers in the real world. Indeed, the winner in this virtual world is Indonesia.

In the ranking of the most visited countries on Google Street View, the country famous for its Komodo dragons comes first, while its capital Jakarta tops the list of Street View’s most visited cities by internet users.

Although, prior to the pandemic, Indonesia had achieved its best year for tourism, welcoming 16 million visitors, the country was by no means one of the world’s major destinations.

The Indonesian ministry of tourism expects to see between 1.8 and 3.6 million travellers this year.

This is a far cry from the 90 million tourists choosing France as a travel destination – a country that takes a modest ninth place in this ranking, just ahead of the UK (10th).

The rest of the top 10 comprises the US (2nd), Japan (3rd), Mexico (4th), Brazil (5th), Spain (6th), Italy (7th) and Taiwan (8th).

However, the virtual world meets the real world when it comes to the tourist sites that attract the most interest from internet users.

Here, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai takes the top spot, followed by France’s Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal in India.