Cultural landscape

The Operational Guidelines define cultural landscapes as cultural properties which represent the ‘combined works of nature and of man’ as designated in Article 1 of the Convention (Paragraph 47).

There is no single World Heritage criterion for cultural landscapes and it is conceivable that any of the cultural criteria might be used in justifying the Outstanding Universal Value of a cultural landscape.

There are three main types of cultural landscape:

• landscapes designed and created intentionally by people;
• organically evolved landscapes; and
• associative landscapes (see Operational Guidelines, Annex 3).

Many properties exhibit more than one of these types and they may be overlapping. This is a dynamic aspect of the Convention, and the concepts are being increasingly elaborated, as are the management approaches, etc.

ICOMOS has produced a thematic bibliography on World Heritage Cultural Landscapes which is available here.

Source(s): World Heritage Resource Manual 'Preparing World Heritage Nominations'