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Welcome to the 5th World Heritage Site newsletter

This edition covers January and February 2005, the start of another year of travel.

More visited sites
The wider Cracow area (Poland) is what you could call a WHS hot spot. No less than 5 sites can be visited using the city of Cracow as a base. I had only time for 3 of them: the famous Wieliczka Salt Mine (http://www.worldheritagesite.org/sites/wieliczka.html), the quiet pilgrimage site Kalwaria Zebrzydowska (http://www.worldheritagesite.org/sites/kalwariazebrzydowska.html) and of course Cracow itself (http://www.worldheritagesite.org/sites/cracow.html).

Next scheduled destination will be Malta (May 2005).

New on the website

Paul Tanner (see his profile at the Community page http://www.worldheritagesite.org/community.php) has provided me with a lot of thoughts about the WHS phenomenon over the last years. He now added reviews of some of his most special WHS visits to the website. They include Mount Athos (http://www.worldheritagesite.org/sites/mountathos.html), Haiti’s National History Park (http://www.worldheritagesite.org/sites/nationalhistorypark.html), Ambohimanga in Madagascar (http://www.worldheritagesite.org/sites/ambohimanga.html) and the Arabian Oryx Sanctuary (http://www.worldheritagesite.org/sites/arabianoryxsanctuary.html). Thank you very much, Paul, and keep on travelling and enjoying it until you’ve seen them all!

On the technical side, a colleague taught me how to draw graphics. This resulted in the new Trivia page (http://www.worldheritagesite.org/trivia.html)

WHS in the news

On Lonely Planet’s Forum The Thorn Tree a long thread has recently developed about the World Heritage List, and the best sites on it (http://thorntree.lonelyplanet.com/messagepost.cfm?postaction=reply&catid=40&messid=5759813&STARTPAGE=1&parentid=0&threadid=678959 ).

Unesco has publicized new Operational Guidelines ( http://whc.unesco.org/pg.cfm?l=en&cid=141). They include the decision “…. to apply the following mechanism at its 30th session (2006): a) examine up to two complete nominations per State Party, provided that at least one of such nominations concerns a natural property; and, b) set at 45 the annual limit on the number of nominations it will review, inclusive of nominations deferred and referred by previous sessions of the Committee, extensions (except minor modifications of limits of the property), transboundary and serial nominations.

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