UNESCO’s World Heritage List now boasts total of 27 new sites

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has inscribed a total of 27 new sites to its World Heritage List, including a Canadian fossil park, a thousand-year-old temple in Cambodia and the lagoons of New Caledonia.

The latest additions include 19 cultural sites and eight natural sites chosen by the agency’s 21-member World Heritage Committee, which is currently holding its 32nd session in Quebec City, Canada.

Yesterday’s additions include a monarch butterfly biosphere preserve in Mexico, a historic Alpine railway linking Switzerland and Italy, an Icelandic volcanic island and an archipelago in Yemen, among others.

The Committee has also expanded the scope of four existing sites. They include Spain’s Altamira Cave, to which 17 more caves with paintings from the Paleolithic era have been added, and the “frontiers of the Roman Empire,” which will now include a 60-kilometre wall fortification in the United Kingdom that was built in the second century A.D.

Added to the List today were the Bahá’i Holy Places in Haifa and Western Galilee (Israel), as well as the first site to be inscribed in Vanuatu, consisting of three sites associated with the life and death of the last paramount chief, or Roi Mata.

Papua New Guinea, San Marino and Saudi Arabia have also had sites inscribed on the List for the first time this year.

The List now numbers a total of 878 sites, 679 cultural and 174 natural sites and 25 mixed in 145 countries.