The Dolomites' jagged peaks in Italy, salt marshes along the shared coastline of the Netherlands and Germany, a colonial slave trading outpost in Cape Verde, and a mountain which acts as a three-dimensional history of Chinese Buddhism are among the sites which Unesco has added to the list of the Earth's most precious places ‑ its register of world heritage sites.
The week-long meeting of the UN agency in Seville has been considering 30 national applications to join the list which already includes the Taj Mahal, Stonehenge, the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China, along with redundant steel plants and coal mines, forests and tropical gardens.
The commissioners have also been debating a sadder roll call of dozens of sites that had already made the list but are now regarded as at risk.
There was good news for Bath – the only UK city to lie entirely within a heritage site – which has kept its world heritage status despite the threat from a controversial development of 118 acres of derelict riverside. After an inspection, the commissioners concluded that the first phase of the Western Riverside redevelopment of former industrial land does not damage the famous Georgian terraces and crescents, but warned that the height and scale of later phases should be reviewed.
Making history
The threat of being dropped is often made but rarely exercised: last year Liverpool, Westminster and the Tower of London and Edinburgh were all put on warning over the impact of new developments.
However this year the commissioners decided to exercise their powers, expelling the German city of Dresden because of the damage to historic views caused by a new four-lane road traffic bridge – only the second time a site has actually been dropped.
A further 176 sites remain on the "at risk" list, menaced by everything from climate change to war.
In Wales they are waiting anxiously to hear whether their aqueduct, nicknamed "the stream in the sky", has made the list. An announcement is expected over the weekend on Britain's only nomination this year, the Pontcysyllte aqueduct near Wrexham, a wonder of Georgian cast-iron engineering designed by Thomas Telford in 1805 to carry boats – and trade between Wales and England – on the Llangollen canal across a deep gorge of the Dee valley. The novelist Sir Walter Scott called it the finest work of art he had ever seen.
The sites that have already been announced include Mount Wutai in China, a five-peak mountain covered in Buddhist temples and monasteries. Religious buildings have been constructed on the mountain since the first century, and the survivors include a Ming dynasty temple with over 500 statues representing Buddhist stories, and the Foguang temple dating back over 1,000 years to the Tang dynasty, the third-oldest timber building in the country. The present building was begun in 857AD, when an even older temple burned down.
The historic centre of Cidade Velha – founded as Ribeira Grande by the Portuguese in 1462 – has become Cape Verde's first world heritage site. The first European colonial town built in the tropics is a monument to the dismal history of the slave trade, and retains many early buildings including churches, a fortress and a ruined cathedral.
Italy, which already has more sites than any other country including scores of castles, palaces, cathedrals and archaeological sites, has won another place for the towering peaks of the Dolomites in the Alps. The 18 peaks rising over 3,000 metres are regarded as one of the most beautiful mountainous landscapes in the world, and the frequent landslips and avalanches in the steep ravines regularly expose a wealth of fossil remains.
Joint effort
In sharp contrast, the mudflats, salt marshes, sea grass meadows, creeks and tidal estuaries of the Wadden Sea, along the coast of the Netherlands and Germany, never rise more than a metre or so above sea level.
Coastal development means that the site, jointly proposed by the two countries and covering over two thirds of the Wadden sea, is now a rare habitat. It supports a wealth of wildlife including rare plants, seals and porpoises, and winter feeding and breeding grounds for millions of migratory birds.
The origin of world heritage sites lies in the international operation in the 1960s to dismantle and move to higher ground the ancient Egyptian temple of Abu Simbel, which would have been destroyed by the rising water of the Aswan dam. Although the status gives no legal protection – still less any funds for conservation – countries that sign up promise to give special protection to sites regarded as part of the common heritage of all mankind.
