Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Four sites added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List


Sun 01 Jul 2018 | 09:22 PM
Mohamed Wadie

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee, meeting in Manama since 24 June under the chair of Shaikha Haya Bint Rashed al-Khalifa of Bahrain, inscribed two cultural sites in Germany and Turkey as well as two mixed sites in Canada and Colombia, on the World Heritage List.

In a press release on Sunday, the UNESCO said the new World Heritage sites, in order of inscription, are as follows:

Cultural sites:

Göbekli Tepe (Turkey) – Located in the Germuş mountains of south-eastern Anatolia, this site presents monumental circular and rectangular megalithic structures, interpreted as enclosures, which were erected by hunter-gatherers in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic age between 9,600 and 8,200 BC.

Naumburg Cathedral (Germany) – Located in the eastern part of the Thuringian Basin, the Cathedral of Naumburg, whose construction began in 1028, is an outstanding testimony to medieval art and architecture. Its Romanesque structure, flanked by two Gothic choirs, demonstrates the stylistic transition from late Romanesque to early Gothic.

Mixed sites:

Pimachiowin Aki (Canada) – Pimachiowin Aki (“The Land That Gives Life”) is a forest landscape crossed by rivers and studded with lakes, wetlands, and boreal forest. It forms part of the ancestral home of the Anishinaabeg, an indigenous people living from fishing, hunting and gathering. The area encompasses the traditional lands of four Anishinaabeg communities (Bloodvein River, Little Grand Rapids, Pauingassi and Poplar River).

Chiribiquete National Park – “The Maloca of the Jaguar” (Colombia) – Located in the north-west Colombian Amazon, Chiribiquete National Park is the largest protected area in the country. One of the defining features of the park is the presence of tepuis (the Native American word for table-top mountains), sheer-sided sandstone plateaux that dominate the forest. Over 75,000 paintings, spanning more than 20,000 years to the present, are to be seen on the walls of the 60 rock shelters around the bases of the tepuis.