December 2008 - #18
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Welcome to the last newsletter of this year, 2008. This year has been another good year for the website, as a number of new features have been introduced. Among those the very popular Connections and the Forum. And your stories of visiting WHS have not stopped coming in either!
Site reviews
Still 85 to go to cover all 878 WHS. It’s slow going now. A number of the unreviewed sites are located in Brazil, Costa Rica and Cuba, and do not seem to be that difficult to reach. At the Inscribed List the ones with a (0) behind their names still need a review, so please ….
Sites that have recently been reviewed for the first time, include:
· Safranbolu (Turkey), “Safranbolu is a lovely old town stuffed with the beautiful wood frame houses built by the merchants”
· Virgin Komi Forests (Russia), “One of the most difficult to reach places in Russia. There are no roads, no airports nearby.”
· White Monuments of Vladimir and Suzdal (Russia), “If you want to see the real old Russia Suzdal is the ideal place..”.
· Golden Mountains of Altai (Russia), “High mountains, nature not touched by human population, deep lakes and landscapes similar to fiords in Norway.”
· Tamgaly (Kazakhstan), “There was one soldier on guard at the site and that day we saw nobody else as we travelled to the site and returned to Almaty. It is fairly isolated.”
Three of these were submitted by our Polish reader Jarek Pokrzywnicki – thanks a lot for broadening our perspective!
New tentative lists
During the past months, several countries have updated their Tentative List.
These are:
· Belgium
· Tunisia
· Russia
Lesotho has submitted a list for the first time. This tiny Southern African country proposes 2 possible WHS: Sehlabathebe National Park and Thaba-Bosiu National Monument .
Meanwhile, the UK is considering to stop submitting any new possible WHS. The UK already is already well-represented on the list (according to Unesco), and a cost-benefit analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers has revealed that obtaining WH status mainly costs money. See their report where the pros and cons are discussed.
Connections
We’ve found now over 300 ways to connect at least 3 WHS. What to think of WHS featured on Banknotes. Or those WHS that are World Biosphere Reserves too. And did you know that the British Prince Charles has a house in one of the Transylvanian Villages?
When you send in your own idea for a connection, please be explicit: what part of the site exactly, and why! That saves me a lot of time checking, and adding some background or trivial information makes a connection much more worth reading for the general audience.
More website features
There’s now a handy checklist online at which you can easily update your count of visited WHS. And we introduced the Resource Library, for all of you who like to read more about world heritage and conservation issues.
That’s it for this edition, I’m off to Tanzania for the holidays (and 4 new WHS).
Wishing you all the best and lots of WHS travel in 2009,
Els
webmaster www.worldheritagesite.org
for questions or ideas, contact
me