News

On behalf of the World Heritage Centre, Director Ms Mechtild Rössler expresses her solidarity with the efforts currently being undertaken by national authorities in Colombia to curb increasing security challenges in the country’s national parks, some of which are classified as natural World Heritage properties. In the light of these increasing and dramatic pressures, Parques Nacionales ...

The first regional meeting on "Transboundary Cooperation for effective management of World Heritage Sites in Africa" was held from 11 to 15 February 2019 in the city of Man (Côte d'Ivoire), located at 100 km from the Mount Nimba Strict Nature Reserve, the first African transboundary property inscribed on the World Heritage List. Funded by the Netherlands Funds-in-Trust, the main objective of ...

An oil spill has reportedly occurred in East Rennell, Solomon Islands on Tuesday, 19 February when a bulk carrier ran aground at Kangava Bay, just outside of the World Heritage property. East Rennell was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1998 and is the largest raised coral atoll in the world. The site includes Lake Tegano, a brackish lake containing many rugged limestone islets which ...

Launched in July 2017 with financial support from the Netherlands Funds-in-Trust, the “Communities and reinforcement of the management of the Royal Palaces of Abomey World Heritage Site” project, has been successfully concluded with a three-day cultural celebration event, from 27 to 29 December 2018. These ‘Cultural Days’ which responded to the theme “Let’s open our Palaces!”, were organized ...

In 2012, Rio de Janeiro, a Carioca landscape between the mountains and the sea, became the first urban cultural landscape ever inscribed on the World Heritage List.  To its beaches, carnival, football and World Heritage, also represented by the archaeological site of the Valongo pier (inscribed in 2017), the Brazilian metropolis now adds yet another attraction: architecture. Following an ...

On 1 October 1919 in Weimar (Germany), a new kind of art school founded by architect Walter Gropius welcomed its first students, and Bauhaus was born. In 2019, we are celebrating the centenary of this school founded after the First World War.  A festival, two museums, exhibitions and even a television series dedicated to Walter Gropius will mark the anniversary of this Movement that ...

UNESCO New Delhi and the Ministry of Tourism, West Bengal Government (India), in support of the Archaeological Survey of India, are organizing a sub-regional conference World Heritage Global Strategy in the context of South Asia on 21 and 22 February 2019 in Kolkata. The Global Strategy, launched in 1994 by the World Heritage Committee, has the aim to ensure that the List reflects the ...

After heavy rains hit northeastern Togo in August 2018, UNESCO led an emergency mission to the World Heritage Property of Koutammakou, to assess the scale of the damage including to some of the world’s rarest architectural structures – the two-storey mud “tower” houses known as Takienta. The mission, which comprised three international and four national experts, visited the villages of ...

This year’s World Wetlands Day under the theme of “Wetlands and Climate Change” highlights the importance of healthy and intact wetlands to one of the most pressing challenges of our times: climate change.  Celebrated annually on 2 February, the day the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands was adopted in 1971, World Wetlands Day is a success story of the international community ensuring efficient ...