  This paper is concerned with locally damped semilinear wave equations defined
on compact Riemannian manifolds with boundary. We present a construction of
measure-controlled damping regions which are sharp in the sense that their
summed interior and boundary measures are arbitrarily small. The construction
of this class of open sets is purely geometric and allows us to prove a new
observability inequality in terms of potential energy rather than the usual one
with kinetic energy. A unique continuation property is also proved. Then, in
three-dimension spaces, we establish the existence of finite dimensional smooth
global attractors for a class of wave equations with nonlinear damping and
forces with critical Sobolev growth. In addition, by means of an obstacle
control condition, we show that our class of measure-controlled regions
satisfies the well-known geometric control condition (GCC). Therefore, many of
known results for the stabilization of wave equations hold true in the present
context.
