Els Slots
Updated Tentative Lists H2 2025
In what I hope will become a half-yearly tradition, I am presenting to you the highlights of the new crop of Tentative Sites that have been submitted in the second half of 2025. The first 6 months were covered here.
Keeping the Tentative Lists on this website up-to-date is important to me: there is no other independent place on the web that does so. Even on the UNESCO website, the topic is covered quite poorly, with no tracing of the lifecycle of the sites, no photos and no maps or validation of geodata (all of which we aim to provide).
The Numbers
2025 has ended with 1807 Tentative Sites (TWHS). In the second half of 2025, 49 were added. 12 of those were replacements of earlier ones. Only 1 TWHS was fully removed and became a Former TWHS (European Paper Mills, Italy).
As with the first half of 2025, the number of new sites listed is significantly above average.
It is hard to keep a perfect track of the numbers, since the UNESCO Bureau often adds sites retrospectively. Last week, even a 2024 listing appeared (the French Beech Forests, probably it had been on hold until their Serbian and Montenegrin counterparts were ready to publish).
In total, 2025 saw 130 new entries and the net result was 51 (as known at the time of writing, January 16, 2026). The trend over the 10 previous years was that an average of 66 new TWHS were added yearly, with a net result of 30; 66 were added, 14 removed, and 22 were inscribed and thus disappeared from the Tentative List as well.
Full make-overs
The following countries did a major update of their Tentative Lists:
- Malawi: a refreshed list of 7, including 4 that had been there before.
- Kazakhstan: 6 new ones, including a reformulation of previously separate petroglyph nominations into larger serial properties.
- Yemen: a new List of 31, already covered in this separate blog post (submitted in June, it was published by UNESCO retrospectively in July)
India did not do a true makeover, but added another 7 to get to 69 TWHS in total. It now ranks second in the list of Countries with the most TWHS, after Turkiye with 79.
Brazil did a clean-up, removing 5 double ones that were still lingering on the T List while already inscribed, such as Anavilhanas Ecological Station and Atol das Rocas.
Notable individual new entries
The Award for the Best name has to go to: Monumental Monuments and Sanctuaries of the Early Steppe Tradition of Central Eurasia (Mausoleum of Kozy-Korpesh–Bayan Sulu, Ritual Structure Dombauyl, and related “Dyng” Towers) (Kazakhstan). I went with "Monuments and Sanctuaries of the Early Steppe" as the short name to show on the website. At least we can be glad that only the monumental monuments have been included.
And Kazakhstan is so keen to get the Ascension Cathedral in Almaty inscribed, they made it part of two new TWHS within half a year: the Sacred Timber Architecture of Central Asia and The Anti-seismic Heritage of Almaty.
A surprise was the resurfacing of "left-over" Beech Forests. The selected forests in France, Serbia, and Montenegro were deferred at the inscription of the main Beech Forests set in 2021. The ones in France and Serbia even had to be "awakened from the death" as they already had been fully removed and thus demoted to the status of Former TWHS.
Among the more imaginative new entries are:
- Gonarezhou National Park: a classy park in Zimbabwe, known for its true wild feel.
- Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy (VDNKh) in Moscow: for those who would like to see more Soviet architecture on the list. We flagged the topic already in 2016 as a gap.
- Sri Lanka's Tea Cultural Landscape (main header photo): an all-encompassing proposal comprising 26 components, from Tea Estates to Cricket Clubs.
- Bobrka oil field: the First Modern Oil Mine, the first place of oil extraction on an industrial scale (established in 1854).
Looking at the list of sites added in H2 2025, are there any Tentative Sites that stand out for you?
Comments
7 comments