A UNESCO World Heritage say is a place or landmark with outstanding universal value to humanity. World Heritage Sites are chosen by the United Nations, Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, better known by its acronym UNESCO to be on the list. A candidate must meet at least one of the ten criteria, such as to represent a masterpiece of human creative genius debate. A unique or exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to contain as a palette of natural phenomena are areas of exceptional natural beauty and that sense sites can be selected because of natural beauty such as the Great Barrier, Reef or the Serengeti, for example, or can be Chosen because of cultural and often historical importance, the Pyramids of Giza or Stonehenge, for example, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Then the world heritage sites are incredibly diverse.
The LES contains most places you would expect the Taj Mahal nacho Picchu the Statue of Liberty, but it also has many places that most people have never heard of whether it be a national park in Tajikistan or a bored. Melon Finland sites come in all shapes and sizes, they range from a single small monument to grand cathedrals, to massive natural landscapes, to entire islands or cities, and even one country, and there are a lot of them as of 2019. There are 1121 world heritage sites, of which 869 our cultural, 213 natural and 39 are mixed in this fourth installment of winners and losers, I’m going to look at the diversity of the world heritage sites comparing and contrasting them and their place in the world. I’M going to start off by looking at number of sales by country which countries have the most starting with fifth place. We have France with 45.
Fourth, thus, Germany, with 46 third, Spain with 48 and there’s actually a tie for first place between China and Italy, both with 55 I’ve put China on top, though, by using shared sites or sites that span two or more countries as a tiebreaker, Italy has sex shared Sites, whereas China only has one chain is 55, are split up into 37 cultural 14 natural and for next cultural sites tend to be the most well-known of these, with multiple examples being the forbidden palace, the Terracotta Army and, of course, the Great Wall. But China has a large number of natural sites as well: forests, mountains, rivers, etc. In fact, according to this list, China is the most naturally beautiful country, or at least has the most natural world heritage days with 14. Joint second place are Australia and the United States. Again, though, Australia gets the edge with less shared sites now switching to cultural says, which countries come out on top.
The top three are Italy, Germany and Spain. Perhaps an unsurprising winner, Italy has several of its cities and their entirety as world heritage sites and several more historic centers. These include Venice Ana’s, Lagoon, Verona and Beach, Enza, plus the historic centers of Rome, Florence, Naples and several more of course, at the opposite end of the spectrum, there are 30 countries with zero World Heritage. Sites of these 26 have no sales, while four countries haven’t even adhere to the world heritage convention. Now it’s one thing to look at countries by just raw number of sales, but it’s not really fair.
When you compare the 1.3 billion people of India to the 1.3 million of Estonia, nor is it fair to compare the 17 million square kilometers of Russia to the 17,000 of q8. So in this category I’m going to look at world heritage, say density by country. I’M going to split us up into cultural and natural size, since cultural sites or human achievements and natural sites are well naturally occurring a ranked cultural sites by population and natural sites by land area for cultural sites.
There’S a very, very clear winner, literally the entire country, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Can you guess which one it is I’ll? Give you a hint, it’s very small as of course the Holy See, Vatican City. In fact, it’s actually part of another Heritage Site. The historic center of Rome also includes all of the Vatican, so the country, as 100 % unesco world heritage, say okay but other than the clearly unfair vatican city were the other winners for this list.
I’Ve left out countries with only one say, as this would skew the numbers in favor of the very small countries. With this exclusion, the winner is Malta with three cultural sites and a population of less than half a million, meaning that Malta has points x3 cultural heritage sales per hundred thousand people coming in a second in third place, also with three sites: each our Cyprus and Montenegro. Montenegro has two shared sites, which is why Cyprus takes second display a higher population. Now you may be wondering of the countries that don’t have any cultural sites, which is the most populous. That would be the Democratic Republic of the Congo with a whopping 86 million people.
So what about natural says again? I’Ve excluded countries with just one say the clear winner here as Seychelles, a small archipelago in the nd in ocean with two National Heritage Sites, despite being less than 500 square kilometers in size, the country has a nature reserve, as well as the algebra at all. Of course, if we were only to includes you know proper sized countries, the winners would be Switzerland, Denmark and Costa Rica again with three sites each coincidentally, each of the top three has one shared site for Switzerland, monte san giorgio shared with italy. For Denmark, the warden si shared with Germany and the Netherlands and for Costa Rica, la amistad international park shared with Panama, so who’s the loser of this category ie. What’S the largest country with a unnatural World Heritage Site?
Well, that would be the 10th largest country in the world. Algeria are nearly 2.4 million square kilometers to be fair, more than for fest of the country is desert and solar is that moving on and away from countries taking a look at the world as a whole. Unesco expressed the world into five different regions, regions which are a bit odd, to say the least. The regions are Europe and North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Arab states and Asia, and the Pacific the clear winner here as Europe and North America, having by far the most sales overall with 529.
The region also has, by far the most cultural, sights with Ashley more than all four other regions combined. Although natural says it comes in a second place behind Asia and the Pacific, which tops the list with 67. This is a map from the official UNESCO website, showing all the world heritage sites on a global scale, showing the extent of the various size. The next category I’m going to do is oldest and newest world heritage days. The list of unesco world heritage sites began in 1978, with 12 entries on the list listed as number one are.
The galapagos islands of ecuador new world heritage sites are added every year, with 20 name being added in 2019. Perhaps the most notable of these is the ancient city of babylon part of modern-day iraq and location of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Hanging Gardens. But, of course, when si was inscribed into the world heritage say lest doesn’t have anything to do with how old or new it actually is. So what are some of the most ancient sites on the list? Well, many of the sites date back to before recorded history.
Due to the uncertainty of the dates and the difficulty of this category, I’ll just suggest a few potential candidates for the oldest site, starting in France, we have the decorated cave of pond Ark containing the earliest known and best preserved figurative drawings in the world, possibly up To 32,000 years old, it’s believed around 20,000 years ago a large boulder fell and blocked the entrance to the cave. Therefore, keeping it so well preserved until it was discovered in 1994. But of course, if you’re looking for an actual structure that was built and is someone tied today, a good candidate, maybe gobekli tepe an archaeological site in modern-day Turkey. What it actually is is still a mystery, but the leading thought is there was some kind of imple dating the site is, of course, extremely difficult, but it was believed to have been constructed in the pre pottery Neolithic somewhere around 9500 BC. For context, that means that we in the present day are closer in time to the construction of the pyramids of giza than the construction of death structure as to them predating them by sex to seven thousand years now, the newest world heritage site was actually more challenging Than I expected the newest one, I was able to faint and not even that new really is the iconic Australian, landmark the Sydney Opera House inaugurated in 1973.
The Opera House was designed by Danish architect, jrn Utzon and according to UNESCO, constitutes a masterpiece of 20th century architecture. Then moving on to something that usually comes first in winners and losers, sighs it seemed less relevant in this episode. The largest on the list is actually a new entry in 2019, the French Austral lands and seas at sixty seven point: three million hectares a little bit unfair, though Center contains a whole slice of Antarctica, roughly equal to the size of the country of Iraq. A slice of Antarctica that isn’t even any different from the rest of the continent. Next is the Phoenix islands protected area of Keira bass, again, not entirely fair, since it’s mostly water, but then again saw the next two and the last as well.
In fifth place of the Galapagos Islands, 1,000 kilometers west of the Ecuadorian mainland, these aliens help Charles Darwin, develop his theory of natural selection and rate his revolutionary book On the Origin of Species published in 1859. On the other hand, the smallest Heritage Site seems to be a small family house, the rate veld Schroder house and the Dutch city of Utrecht at 75 square metres or 800 square feet built in 1924. The house is considered an icon of the modern movement in architecture becoming a world heritage site in the year 2000. Other tiny sites includes the Thracian tomb of Kazanlak and Bulgaria, Arvid doubled the size of the Schroder house and then there’s also the holy trinity column and the Czech Republic, which the UNESCO say less as 0.05 hectares or 500 square meters.
Let’S move on to the most visited sites now, whether having the most visitors as the winner or loser of this category is debatable. On the one hand, having loss of visitors implies popularity, but to dislocations crowded with thousands, and thousands of people is never fun, not to mention the entire point of the Heritage List is conservation and people can cause damage over time. Getting exact numbers for this wasn’t easy, but a solid contender for the top spot. As the Forbidden City palace complex in Beijing with around fourteen or fifteen million visitors annually, another possible candidate would be Paris. The banks of the Seine as the Heritage Day is called the most visited place in Paris in 2018, was the notre-dame Cathedral with 12 million visitors.
Although, given the tragic events that took place earlier this year, that may change in the future, unfortunately, some other highly visited sites are also in China su a small pedestrian only Eiland off the southeast course of the mainland, with more than 11 million annual visitors. Also with a similar number of visitors is the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the United States. The park is part of the Appalachian mountain chain on the border between Tennessee and North Carolina earlier in the video I briefly mentioned, shared sights a world heritage say that spans two or more countries, so which say spans the most countries. That would be the ancient and primeval beech forests of the Carpathians and other regions of Europe to give it a sufficient echo, which spans 12 different countries. The say consists of many different forests across Europe from Spain to Ukraine and shows the adaptability of the beech tree and his ability to spread across an entire continent.
Other extensive sites include the Struve a geodesic arc, also in Europe pushes a chain of survey triangulations, stretching from the tip of Norway, all the way to the Black Sea spanning ten different countries. The system of markers was used in the 1800s to help determine the exact size and shape of the earth. There’S also the architectural work of liqueur dossier and outstanding contributions in the modern movement. Seventeen says mostly in Europe also one each in Argentina, India and Japan for a total of seven countries, the site’s, maintaining their cultural significance or natural beauty is of the utmost importance to UNESCO. For this reason, some sites are designated in danger of losing their status for any number of reasons, such as pollution, deforestation, climate change, urban expansion, corruption and quite often war.
Unfortunately, that are currently 53 saves on this list. These include the historic center of Vienna, the old city of Jerusalem, as well as the Everglades National Park. The big winners of this category are actually just the countries with the most size of the top five countries. Not one of them has a single site in danger. So that’s good on the flipside.
The big losers here are Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya and Afghanistan, four countries that have all their heritage states in danger. There are two ways to get off the end: AngelList one is the somehow improved the situation or the other way lose World Heritage Site status. Only two Saints have ever lost their status. The Arabian oryx sanctuary in Oman was directly removed, skipping the ending girlist altogether being delisted in 2007 after the government’s decision to reduce the size of the protected area by 90 %. In addition, the Dresden Elbe Valley in Germany was delisted in 2009 due to a bridge beam bail across the valley where she Nazca viewed as damaging is cultural value.
That’S all for episode, 4 of winners and losers. I hope you enjoyed it and, as always, feel free to leave your suggestions for episode. 5. Now, if you’re interested in learning more about the first ever UNESCO World Heritage Site the Galapagos Islands, I would highly recommend absolutely fascinating documentary. I watched called wild Galapagus.
This two-part documentary looks at several different, unique and often unusual species, many of which arrived at the islands against their well caught on the strong ocean currents. The documentary shows how these creatures adapted to an environment where they don’t belong and how they interact with each other. If you would like to watch it, you can do so on curiosity stream, an online streaming service with over 2400 documentaries and nonfiction titles, with content spanning science, nature, history, technology and so much more membership stars are very affordable, $ 2
99 a month and you can get started completely free with a 31 day trial by signing up at curiosity stream com forward, slash wonder-why and enter the promo code. Wonder why, during the signup process, a massive? Thank you once again to curiosity stream for helping support this channel by sponsoring this video and, of course, thanks to each and every one of you for watching I’ll, see you in the next video
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