New sites added to World Heritage list, part 2

13 July 2009

New sites added to World Heritage list, part 2

Posted by Cecilia under: Culture .

Here are five cultural sites recently added to the World Heritage list. These five join two newly added natural sites and one cultural site as we reported last Monday.

The Ruins of Loropéni, Burkina Faso

This site is the first in Burkina Faso to be inscribed in the World Heritage list. It contains a cultural treasure with its imposing stone walls of fortresses bearing testimony to the power of the trans-Saharan gold trade. The ruins have been shown to be at least 1,000 years old. The site is expected to yield much more information about the early settlements in the region.

Cidade Velha, Historic Centre of Ribeira Grande, Cape Verde

The town or Ribeira Grande was the first European colonial outpost in the tropics, located in the south of the island of Santiago. The town contains the impressive remains of the original street layout, two churches, a royal fortress and the Pillory Square with its 16th-century marble pillar.

Mount Wutai , China

Mount Wutai is a sacred Buddhist mountain dotted with 53 monasteries and temples with life size clay sculptures. The Ming Dynasty Shuxiang Temple even features a huge complex of 500 statues representing Buddhist stories. This site shows how Buddhist architecture developed and influenced palace building in China over more than one millennium.

Shushtar, Historical Hydraulic System, Iran

This ingenious hydraulic system consists of tunnels, dams, bridges and mills and most of all of two main diversion canals. One of them, the Gargar canal, is still providing water to the city of Shushtar. It forms a spectacular cliff from which water cascades into a downstream basin. The site also includes the Salâsel Castel, the operation centre of the entire hydraulic system. It bears witness to the know-how of the Elamites and earlier the Sumerians of Mesopotamia.

Sulamain-Too Sacred Mountain, Kyrgyzstan

This site forms the backdrop to the city of Osh at the crossroads of important trade routes on the Central Asian Silk Road. For more than one and a half millenia Sulamain was a beacon for travellers, revered as a sacred mountain. It contains numerous ancient places of worship, caves with petroglyphs and two reconstructed 16yh-century mosques. Veneration for the mountain blends pre-Islamic and Islamic beliefs. The site is considered to be the most complete example of a sacred mountain anywhere in Central Asia worshipped over several thousand years.