What is a World Heritage Site, anyway?
The Unesco World Heritage Committee, elected by nation states every four years, meets once a year to choose the world’s natural or human-made wonders in the greatest need of protection. Any country is eligible to send in a list of nominees for protection. Each site must meet at least one of 10 criteria, among them:
• represent a “masterpiece of human creative genius”
• be “an important interchange of human values”
• “bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to civilisation” past or present
• be an outstanding example of a type of building or settlement which illustrates a significant stage in human history
• “contain superlative natural phenomena or areas of exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance”
• be outstanding examples of major stages of Earth’s history or ecological and biological processes in evolution
• house threatened species “of outstanding universal value”
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There are currently 878 world heritage sites which include 678 listed for cultural reasons and 174 lauded as wonders of nature. These include the Great Barrier Reef, the Serengeti Desert, the Pyramids of Giza, the Statue of Liberty, the Great Wall of China, Mount Kenya, Edinburgh’s Old and New Towns, Hadrian’s Wall, Stonehenge, Memphis and its Necropolis, Persepolis, the Palace of Westminster, the centre of St Petersburg, the Banaue rice terraces in the Philippines and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station in Mumbai. The country with the biggest number of sites is Italy, which has 43.
EGYPT WORLD HERITAGE SITES
• Abu Mena (1979)
• Cultural site Ancient Thebes with its Necropolis (1979)
• Cultural site Historic Cairo (1979)
• Cultural site Memphis and its Necropolis – the Pyramid Fields from Giza to Dahshur (1979)
• Cultural site Nubian Monuments from Abu Simbel to Philae (1979)
• Cultural site Saint Catherine Area (2002)
• Natural site Wadi Al-Hitan (Whale Valley) (2005)
This year, the committee met in Quebec City, Canada, and added an extra 27 places across the globe to its list of “endangered species”. Among them were more than 100 monumental tombs at Al-Hijr in Saudi Arabia, built by the Nabataean people between the first century BC and AD100. Another was the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico, where one billion butterflies overwinter each year. The committee also added the island of Surtsey, which appeared 20 miles south of Iceland as a result of volcanic eruptions between 1963 and 1967, and is a pristine natural laboratory for the study of plant and animal colonisation.
Does it help to have World Heritage status?
Yes…
• It brings extra funds to poor countries to help conserve places of universal value
• It draws attention to the world’s most neglected treasures and places of historic interest or natural beauty
• It can save places from total destruction by natural or human forces
No…
• It brings in floods of extra tourists whose footprint can do more harm than good
• It can have the effect of preserving a living place in aspic and stifling innovation
• It can undermine a country’s right to make decisions about its own heritage
Source: Paul Vallely for The Independent
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