UNESCO expands World Heritage Site list

FRANCE: A silver mine in Japan, rock carvings in Namibia and the Sydney Opera House were among places added to the list of World Heritage Sites by UNESCO, the UN’s culture organisation.

The southwestern French city of Bordeaux, home to one of Europe’s biggest 18th-century architectural urban areas, was also placed on the prestigious list along with the old town of Corfu and the Mehmed Pasa Sokolovic Bridge of Visegrad in eastern Bosnia.

The new sites were announced by UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee meeting in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The Rideau Canal in the Canadian capital of Ottawa and Switzerland’s Lavaux vineyard terraces along the northern shores of Lake Geneva made the list of the world’s most prized areas.

The committee also listed two natural sites and one mixed cultural and natural site from among 45 applications, with more additions expected.

The Iwami Ginzan Silver Mine site on the southwest of Honshu Island in Japan includes the remains of fortresses, large-scale mines, smelting and refining sites worked between the 16th and 20th centuries.

The Parthian Fortresses of Nisa in the Central Asian state of Turkmenistan were another site included in the list.

They were part of one of the earliest and most important cities of the Parthian empire, a major power for 600 years from the third century BC.

Australia’s Sydney Opera House got the listing 34 years after it was built by Danish architect Jorn Utzon.

“A great urban sculpture set in a remarkable waterscape, at the tip of a peninsula projecting into Sydney Harbour, the building has had an enduring influence on architecture,” the UNESCO committee said.

But a natural park in Oman, the Arabian Oryx Sanctuary, was removed from the list after the Omani government slashed the size of the protected area by 90 percent — the first time UNESCO has taken such a step since the list was created 35 years ago.

India got a new listing with its Red Fort complex, built as the palace fort of Shahjahanabad, the new capital of Shahjahan, the fifth Mughal Emperor of India who reigned from 1628 to 1658.

China’s Kaiping site in Guangdong Province features 1,800 multi-storied defensive village houses displaying a flamboyant fusion of Chinese and Western forms built in response to banditry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the committee said.

Namibia’s first World Heritage site is Twyfelfontein, which has one of the largest concentrations of rock carvings in Africa. More than 2,000 figures so far recorded represent animals and footprints.

The Iraqi shrine city of Samarra, the repeated target of sectarian bombings, has been listed as a site in danger. It was once a powerful Islamic capital which ruled over the provinces of the Abbasid empire extending from Tunisia to Central Asia in the 9th century.

The first bombing in 2006 destroyed the shrine’s golden dome and sparked Sunni-Shiite reprisals that claimed tens of thousands of lives. The follow-up attack earlier this month destroyed the shrine’s two gold-covered minarets.

The UNESCO committee named Lope-Okanda in Gabon in west-central Africa as a mixed natural and cultural site for its unusual mix of tropical rainforest and savannah environments which are home to a great diversity of animals.

Teide National Park, on the Spanish island of Tenerife, was named as a natural World Heritage site.

The primeval beech forests of the Carpathians in Eastern Europe were also named on the natural list. The world heritage committee meeting in Christchurch ends on Monday, after deciding which applications join the 830 World Heritage sites previously named.

Paris, Friday, AFP