UNESCO World Heritage List



A UNESCO World Heritage Site is a geographic site that has been selected for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's International World Heritage Programme. The programme aims to catalogue and preserve sites of outstanding importance, either cultural or natural, to the common heritage of humankind. While the World Heritage Committee maintains a list of World Heritage Sites, they make no independent review; in practice, they are listed by each national government. After the 2023 session of the World Heritage Committee, there is a total of 1,199 sites. With around 400 sites on the second smallest continent, Europe has by far the highest density of world heritage sites. Only a little over 200 sites are in the Americas and Oceania combined.

There are several related UNESCO programmes:
 * UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, for things that cannot be touched such as musical or culinary traditions.
 * UNESCO Creative Cities, a programme which recognizes entire cities for their cultural contributions.
 * UNESCO Global Geoparks Network, for parks of great geological interest.
 * UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves
 * UNESCO Memory of the World (MoW), programme to preserve the documentary heritage of humanity.

There are also conservation programmes run by other organizations, such as the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, especially as Waterfowl Habitat.

If you would like to help expanding Wikivoyage's coverage of world heritage sites, like starting new guides etc., please check the World Heritage Expedition

French Southern and Antarctic Lands
See &sect; Australia for Heard and McDonald Islands and &sect; Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha for the Gough and Inaccessible Islands.

Russia
See also the list of Russian sites in Europe.

Syria
NOTE: Syria is a war zone. By 2015, news reports were indicating all six of the country's listed sites had been gravely damaged. The sites remain on the UNESCO heritage list and the list of UNESCO heritage in danger. Much of Palmyra was destroyed after the city fell to Da'esh extremists in 2015; the Assad régime regained control in 2016 but the damage has been done.

Denmark
For sites in Greenland (officially listed under Denmark), see the table below

Russia
See also the list of Russian sites in Asia.

Delisted sites
The process of delisting a site is a lengthy political endeavor. Mere continued existence of a UNESCO listing should not be taken as evidence the underlying site (or its landmark heritage) still exists. UNESCO's World Heritage Committee updates a list of endangered sites annually (see List of World Heritage in Danger on Wikipedia) as a political tool to pressure individual countries to take specific conservation measures or to refrain from certain actions that are seen as endangering the world heritage site. Sites such as Hatra in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria remain listed as UNESCO World Heritage (and as World Heritage in Danger) in 2017, even though warring belligerents have largely obliterated anything of historic value. Conversely, Taiwan is denied UN recognition on entirely political grounds and has no UNESCO world heritage listings, despite the existence of eleven sites which would otherwise be suitable candidates.

In some cases, a UNESCO listing has irrevocably harmed a site. The term UNESCO-cide, coined by Italian writer Marco d'Eramo, describes a pattern where listing a tiny fishing village or historic community to protect the buildings from developers creates an unsustainable influx of travellers. As gentrification and hyper-commercialisation price the original people and their subsistence fishery out of the community, existing structures are repurposed as travel lodging or tacky souvenir shops. UNESCO pays lip service to sustainable travel, but tends to underestimate its own impact on tiny, vulnerable communities. Conversely, some listings of UNESCO sites as "in danger" are arguably political responses to actions or non-actions of local authorities which are hardly capable of destroying or seriously endangering the site. The United States and Israel left UNESCO in protest after their recognition of Palestine, and are thus not eligible to propose new sites for the list; however, the United States rejoined in 2023.

A majority vote of the World Heritage Committee at a UNESCO meeting may be used to revoke a landmark's status as a World Heritage Site. This has happened three times:

The following are sites that were once registered World Heritage Sites but have since been taken off the list: