Blog Post

Best Countries

By Els Slots 23 Jan 2022

While travelling in Mexico and reading other people’s reviews of Turkey, I was thinking that these 2 countries must be among the best WHS travel has to offer. But what about China? It has a huge list already, with many very fine sites. For an answer, I decided to query the data that we have gathered from the ratings of WHS by community members. Which countries are overall best for WHS?

Top Lists

I did a few selections that seemed appropriate to answer the question. You can do your own by looking at the Country Ranking page.

Overall the best countries, with an average score of 4 or higher, are:

  1. Zambia - 4.8
  2. Afghanistan - 4.7
  3. DRC/Holy See - 4.6
  4. Palau/Chad - 4.5
  5. Haiti - 4.4
  6. New Zealand - 4.3
  7. Yemen/Sudan - 4.2
  8. Guatemala/Honduras/Namibia - 4.1
  9. Ireland/Libya/Solomon Islands/Tanzania - 4.0

bestcountries1.jpg

Looking only at the countries with 5 WHS or more, the ranking is:

  1. DRC - 4.6
  2. Libya/Tanzania - 4.0
  3. Egypt/Zimbabwe - 3.9
  4. Algeria/Argentina/Syria/Turkey/Uzbekistan - 3.8
  5. Australia/Peru/USA - 3.7

And among the large countries, with 20 WHS or more:

  1. Australia/USA - 3.7
  2. Canada/China/Russia - 3.6
  3. India/Mexico - 3.5
  4. Brazil/Italy/Japan - 3.4

Turkey is ominously missing from the last selection as it has ‘only’ 19 WHS so far. But with a Tentative List of 54 it’s just a matter of time it will storm this top list as well.

Some conclusions

What can be learned from this?

  • The higher the number of WHS a country has, the higher the chance becomes there is a “miss” (a WHS with a rating below 3 stars) among them. The USA has only 3 of those, whereas China for example has 10.
  • Another effect that comes into play is that natural sites on average are ranked higher than cultural sites: 3.72 versus 3.25. So countries with a lot of natural WHS (USA, Australia) come out higher than a country like Italy which mostly relies on cultural sites.

bestcountries2.jpg

Community bias

Finally, the community ratings should be looked at critically. Do they rate the worthiness of a site being a WHS, or the visitor experience? The latter seems to be the most common practice. Especially very old sites such as hominid fossils or neolithic remains do not score well.

Also, we see that ratings vary wildly per person. Mexico’s Hospicio Cabanas is ranked between 1 and 4 stars for example. It may be that the lower rating reflects a view from the outside only, while the higher ones also take the murals in the interior into account. From the reviews, it can be gathered that the site has improved its visitor experience over the years as well.

And some WHS are visited more often than others, so these will have more outliers in their ratings. For the individual site score, this effect is already taken care of by using a toned-down Wilson score .