UNESCO inscribes 42 new sites for heritage protection

The total number of UNESCO World Heritage sites rose to 1,199 this week, with the inscription of 42 new sites around the globe. The World Heritage Committee has named 33 cultural sites and 9 natural sites to the comprehensive list that offers “the highest level of heritage protection in the world.”

Historic locations, ancient structures, buildings, and landscapes named to the list span centuries. Among these are burial grounds in Spain and Mongolia dating back to 1600 BCE and memorial sites of the Rwanda genocide from the 1990s.

Of note this year is the addition of three new Sites of Memory, places where an event occurred that people would like to see memorialized. “Either already accessible, or made accessible to the public, these sites become places of reconciliation, contemplation and peaceful reflection,” UNESCO detailed in a press release.

The recently named Sites of Memory include a former naval academy in Argentina turned detention center during a military dictatorship, genocide sites in Rwanda, and burial sites across France and Belgium for tens of thousands of World War I soldiers. The committee also added sites in Ukraine to its List of World Heritage in Danger. When Russia’s full-scale invasion broke out in February 2022, UNESCO put out a call for historic sites in Ukraine to be protected. The Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv and a complex of monastic and Lavra buildings of Kyiv-Pechersk, and the historic center of Lviv were added to the list of under threat sites and landscapes due to the ongoing conflict.

Prehistoric Sites of Talayotic Menorca, Spain (Ivan_bea/Public Domain)

In the U.S. a site consisting of earthworks built nearly 2,000 years ago, in what is now Ohio, received preservation status as a surviving example of Hopewell culture. The mounds built from ground matter are only the 25th site in the U.S. to receive heritage protection from UNESCO.

Notable architectural additions include Kaunas, a city in Lithuania, that grew from 1919–1939 as a lauded example of modernism, now coined Kaunas Modernism. The site’s Executive Summary states “Kaunas Modernism is an exceptional example of rethinking architecture as a process of social, political, and cultural modernisation in the 20th century.” Others include the protection of Kuldīga, a medieval hamlet in Latvia, of which the street layout is largely unchanged and traditional log architecture remains intact.