Welcome to the first World Heritage Site newsletter!

Proudly presenting another milestone in the history of this ever expanding website.
Some statistics that go with that: there are now 462 reviews of World Heritage Sites from visitors available, plus 146 sites that I personally visited. Daily about 1500 unique viewers take a look at the website. So I'm really happy with how things are going at the moment. The 'project' I'm working on now is to improve the pages of the sites that are still a bit bleak (without pictures, links or additional information).

Additions to the website
On a personal level, the past two months were marked by my visit to Beijing. In and around China´s capital I visited 7 worldheritages, ranging from the Forbidden Palace to the Peking Man site. Take a look at the China page for more details.

Lots of visitors added their contributions to the site also. Special attention I´d like to ask for Robert Natarelli´s lovestory on/in Bruges, and the detailed travel report of David Lewis on Aksum. Also, already the third account on the very hard to get to Aldabra Atoll has appeared.

World heritage sites in the news
Starting with a health check: are all 754 world heritage sites more or less in one piece? Some bad news comes from Greece, where a fire destroyed artifacts in an ancient monastery on Mt. Athos (http://www.iht.com/articles/508829.html). A more slow process is going on on Easter Island, where the statues crumble away (http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=265772004).

Looking on the bright side, Australia is to ban fishing from third of Barrier Reef ( http://edition.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/03/25/australia.reef.reut/index.html) and Confucius' hometown Qufu restores its ancient city wall (http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200403/31/eng20040331_139085.shtml)

In China, one of the country's greatest myths was brought down: amidst the celebrations of the first Chinese man in space (Yang Liwei), the Ministry of Education decided to adjust school textbooks in which is stated that the Great Wall is one of only two manmade constructions that can be seen from space ( http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/03/12/china.great.wall.myth.ap/index.html)

As the announcement date for this years new entries to the World Heritage List draws nearer (Suzhou, early July), stories about proposed registrations in the more distant future keep appearing in the world's online newspapers. Two of them are the Ancient Hun capital Tongwancheng (http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-04/06/content_1403411.htm) and the Antonine Wall (http://www.scotland.gov.uk/pages/news/2004/03/SETCS54s.aspx).

And finally, a brave scientific attempt to laser scan every world heritage has started: http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/8128125.htm



That´s it for this edition
Els
webmaster www.worldheritagesite.org