Pink flamingos in Kenya | © Mogens Trolle/Dreamstime.com
The United Nations adds 25 new sites to its list of priceless locations of global heritage — and five of them are in Africa.
Since 1972, protecting sites around the world deemed important to the natural or cultural heritage of humanity has been one of the jobs taken on by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Ever since then, they’ve maintained a list of places designated as World Heritage Sites.
Today, that list grew by 25 sites, five of which are in Africa:
- Fort Jesus, Kenya
- Lake System in the Great Rift Valley, Kenya
- Saloum Delta, Senegal
- Meroe Island, Sudan
- Konso Cultural Landscape, Ethiopia
Overall, the Asia/Pacific region has the largest number of new heritage sites with eight, followed by Europe with seven, Africa with five, the Americas with three and the Middle East with two.
You can see the entire list of new World Heritage sites here.
The full list holds a total of 936 natural and culture heritage sites around the globe in nearly 190 countries. That makes the UNESCO World Heritage list a handy document to consult if you ever find yourself running out of vacation ideas.
You can view the full World Heritage Site list, all 936 places on it, here.
Meanwhile, if you’re wondering whether there are any World Heritage Sites in the United States, the answer is 21, of which 15 are national or state parks. This, in a country where national park attendance has been falling for the last two or three decades, despite the fact that admission to many of these parks is free.
Could it be that the UN values America’s natural beauty more than America does?
POSTSCRIPT
In researching this blog post, I stumbled across another UNESCO list I hadn’t seen before, a list of endangered World Heritage sites.This list has 36 locations named on it. Sixteen of them nearly half, are in Africa — five of them in the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone. All five are national parks.
This is a list i hope to see shrink over time.
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