In last week’s blog post I referred to Padua’s Fresco Cycles and wondered why it took so long to get them inscribed. During the preparatory research, I also found out that it is the highest-rated WHS that was inscribed in the past 5 years. It got me curious to look for other recent WHS with very high ratings, and if there are any remarkable trends to discover.

Highest scores of the past 5 years

The following sites, which were inscribed in the last 5 years (2020-2024), have received the highest approval scores by the community members of this website. Remember that 2020 and 2022 had no WHC sessions. The ranking is sorted by the last column, based on the toned-down Wilson score we use on this website to deal with outliers and few votes.

Findings:

• Two WHS in this bracket still suffer from too few votes to make the score representative.
• The no.1 of this group only ranks #166 overall, and the no. 10 is #494!
• No less than 8 out of 10 WHS are cultural.
• None have reached a score of 4 or higher (equalling 'very …

Last week I was in Northeast Italy, celebrating the 10th anniversary of our immersive Art History course in Florence with my study mates (it turned out to be ‘only’ 9 years ago we found out during the trip). We were roughly in the Veneto Hotspot , covering Verona, Padua, Mantua, and Vicenza. I also added two days on my own in Bologna. These were all revisits for me. It's a region that has been popular for its treasures of art for centuries, even the French troops took a lot home from here as seen in the new Napoleonic booty connection.

Below are my Top Tips for Travel to the Veneto Hotspot as a WH Traveller in 2024.

1. Choose your base wisely

We have Venice as the center of the Veneto Hotspot and while its international airport and two inner-city WHS make this a logical choice, I’d recommend choosing a different base. Venice is the most expensive and the most touristy city in this region. For lower costs of hotels and food in restaurants, consider Verona, Padua, or even Bologna. The latter’s university crowd guarantees cheap eateries and the city has excellent train connections with the rest of Italy and …

Wojciech’s recent review of the Minaret of Jam (“The road from Herat takes 13 hours…”) sparked a debate about whether this Afghan icon is The Most Remote Cultural WHS. A quick look at our “ Takes more than 5 days ”-connection brings up Bikini Atoll, but all other remote ones listed there are natural or mixed. In a quest to find more Remote Cultural WHS, I took a systematic approach.

The Approach

I started with a subset of sites that are rarely visited: a combination of the ‘ least visited WHS ’ (cutting it to 10 members or fewer that have visited) and the ones in the '1,000 visitors or fewer' connection . This resulted in a list of 46 different Cultural WHS.

Then I tried to measure the time it takes from a hub city to get to the WHS. With a hub city I mean a place with decent hotels and frequent onward connections to the rest of the country, including an international airport. I used what is mentioned in the reviews and also Google Maps. Timings are calculated under ‘normal’ conditions (no active war, no weather disruptions, not out-of-season).

I …

Solivagant often sends me inspirational things on WH-related topics, but I don’t always have the time to do something with them. This also was the case with ‘ The World’s Greatest Natural Areas ’. At the 24-hour ferry back from Ogasawara, I finally found some focused hours to digest this article published in 1982 by the Commission on National Parks and Protected Areas (CNPPA) of IUCN. This was in the early years of the World Heritage Convention, and they decided to come up with an indicative inventory of natural sites with the potential to be listed. It’s interesting to see where we stand now, 42 years later.

The Inventory

The CNPPA came up with 219 different sites in its concise and well-written article, spread across the biogeographic realms as follows:

1. Nearctic: 33
2. Palaearctic: 42
3. Afrotropical: 47
4. Indomalayan: 31
5. Oceanian: 14
6. Australian: 13
7. Antarctic: 6
8. Neotropical: 33

Their WH status now

Of the 219 proposals, 115 sites have since acquired WH status and 29 more are on the Tentative Lists. Some WHS are partial representations of the proposals in “The World’s Greatest Natural …

With a four-week trip to seven of the most recent or most remote Japanese WHS, I have ‘completed’ the country, the second person on this website to do so after Zoë. It was a wonderful trip, my fourth to Japan, and I am certainly not done with it—there are still more areas to explore. I would like to go to Shikoku Island or Hokkaido in the winter, for example.

Below are my Top Tips for Travel to Japan as a WH Traveller in 2024.

1. Being in Japan is better than seeing all its WHS

Just being in Japan and taking part in its daily life trumped the quality of its sights on each of my four visits. Think of a world where people are raised to be considerate of each other. You can roam the streets of the big cities alone late at night, or leave your bag unattended when you pick up something from a counter or go to the toilet. One with the best public transport system in the world. And with an extremely rich food culture. It’s a "Land of Instructions" too, sometimes bordering on the silly (see top photo), but those make things easier when …

My first one from the “ Takes 5 days or more to visit ”-list! The Ogasawara Islands are a Japanese archipelago in the Northern Pacific Ocean about 1,000km south of Tokyo and 1,800km north of Guam. They can only be visited by a weekly ferry which takes 24 hours to cover the distance. About 2,500 people inhabit its two main islands. Settlers arrived here in the 19th century, the islands were mostly uninhabited before. After having been taken by the US during the Second World War, the islands were returned to Japan in 1968.

Despite being a group of islands, the OUV is not marine but firmly focused on land (rapidly diversifying land snails! endemic plants!) – even UNESCO seems to have forgotten that as its Gallery only shows photos of sea creatures. About 80% of the core zones of the 5 components are land-based. On Chichi-jima, where I stayed for 3 nights, the core zone of the WHS covers about 65% of this island; the coastal villages and agricultural fields are excluded.

The protected area that lies closest to the main settlement of Omura is Miyanohama Beach . And that is where I headed …

One of the things I like most about visiting WHS is that it opens up lesser-known regions even when the WHS itself isn’t too great. This is certainly the case for Sado Island, a lovely example of a slowish, rural Japan. Sado's size is fairly large, it even is the second largest island (after Okinawa) outside of the four main islands of Japan. Its other major tourist attraction in addition to the WH-listed Gold Mines is the Toki (Crested Ibis), which has been reintroduced here after it had become extinct in Japan.

I started my visit at the two mines of Sado Kinzan: Sohdayu (400 years old) and Dohyu (100 years old). The combined entrance fee is 1500 yen (9 EUR). You’re not forced on a guided tour here as is so common at other WH mines, dragging yourself behind a guide elaborating in Polish or Spanish. You just walk through the tunnels and see the exhibits at your own pace. The information is displayed in both Japanese and English. The OUV of the Sado mines lies in its Edo-period way of mining, but – as with Rosia Montana which is recognized for its Roman way …

It has been a long, hot summer in Japan this year. It still affected Hokkaido’s Shiretoko NP when I visited in early September – with daily temperatures of about 26 degrees, it wasn’t what I had expected. No mist and clouds, and it looked more like Central Sweden during Midsummer than a place notorious for its seasonal sea ice.

Before going, it is important to understand which of the ‘seasons’ you’re in: this strongly affects which activities you can do and what animals you might see. There’s the ‘Drift Ice Season’ (mid-January to early March), the ‘Bear Active Season’ (May-July) and the ‘Eco Preservation Awareness Season’ (August to mid-November). Outside these tourist months, everything will be closed and roads are impassable due to snow. I flew into Memanbetsu Airport and rented a car from there (it’s a 1.5h drive). You can also get around on public transport but there aren’t many buses a day.

In September, the main trail at the Shiretoko Five Lakes can be walked independently (in ‘Bear Active Season’ you may not). You do need to get a permit though at the Shiretoko Goko Field House (costing a nominal 250 yen) and …

I guess few people outside of the Koreas often think about the Korean War (1950-1953). Still, it was a very bloody struggle with 3 million casualties, it saw a confrontation between China and the USA during the Cold War and its repercussions (such as the continuation of the Kim dynasty in the DPRK) are felt until today. To refresh my knowledge, I listened to two recent episodes of the podcast ‘Empire’ during my flight to South Korea, which dealt with the Korean War and the period leading up to it.

As only one of two cities in the South never captured by the communist insurgents, Busan was the de facto capital of South Korea during the war period. It also hosted 500,000 refugees from the rest of the country, more than its regular inhabitants. The TWHS ‘ Sites of the Busan Wartime Capital ’ aims to illustrate that particular period in the city’s history via 9 component sites. I visited 3 of those.

I started at the Busan Citizens Park, which was a horse race track during the Japanese occupation of Korea and later the US Army Camp Hialeah . It was used by the …

After having already introduced pages showing community member statistics and those for each of the WHS sessions over the past months, I had similar ones for the countries left to do. Of course, countries can also be ranked on their 'performance'. Kyle (winterkjm) already shared a nice appetizer at the Forum this week, as he compared countries on 10 key data points. It is remarkable how similar South Korea and Portugal are in their patterns.

The country statistics are spread across 3 different pages, which can be accessed here . I will introduce each of them below.

Core data

The main overview page shows:

Size : the State Parties ranked by geographical size. I could have chosen population numbers or GDP as well, but (as did Kyle) I found ‘size’ the most interesting denominator. The largest countries with relatively few (<10) WHS are Kazakhstan, Algeria, DR of Congo and Saudi Arabia.

Country : a list of all ‘countries’ that have ratified the WH Convention. New is Nauru (see its pretty flag above), of which it was confirmed this week that they ratified last July. It became our 196th “country”. The …