Generally, I find it hard to prepare for sites within my own region with the same level of detail as I do for more exotic WHS. For example the City of Luxembourg : I had been there in 1984 and 2001, but couldn’t tell you more than I liked the panoramas. Most of the other reviews to date are also fairly superficial. A breakthrough in the knowledge of this WHS came when Jurre recently suggested some 25 new connections for it. During a 3 night revisit right after Christmas 2021, I further discovered that from a WH perspective it has at least 3 remarkable features that I was not aware of beforehand: its boundaries, a list of 20 notable monuments, and controversy before inscription.

The Boundaries

Although Luxemburg’s city centre is only small already, the core zone of this WHS covers an even smaller part. There is a hugely detailed official map available, but on the ground, the borders between core and buffer zones are hard to distinguish. Unfortunately, not everything that looks like an old rampart is included, neither is every 19th-century public building. Previous reviewers mentioned Fort Thüngen, Place Guillaume, and Place d'Armes, …

Yesterday, January 1st 2022, I have started the next iteration of my life-long World Heritage Journey. I have quit my IT job and handed in my company lease car. I will do nothing else for a while other than travelling to WHS, writing about WHS, learning about WHS, engaging in the discourse on WHS, maybe even building a career out of it. It’s a dream that I always have hoped to fulfill, and all signs are positive now to take the jump. My " Missing Map " shows the To-do List:

Why 1100 WHS in 2030?

My original goal was “to see all WHS before I die”. But you never know when you are going to die, it may come earlier than statistics predict. And we also do not know whether the WH List will ever be finite. At this moment in time, I think I will be quite satisfied at reaching 1100. I do not long for those remote diving locations (eg. Cocos Island , Revillagigedo ) and there’s the issue that a longer list will not make the content better. With an average of 20 new additions per year, I expect that the …

2021 wasn’t the travel year we expected it to become, with a lot of Covid restrictions still or again in place. However, most borders opened in some form and after jumping through the right hoops (vaccine certificates, test results, QR codes) travel in large parts of the world was possible without a problem. This website thrived anyway, with visitor numbers back to normal so people at least have regained their appetite for reading about and planning travel.

Community Travel

Fortunately, the combined 2020/2021 WHC brought 34 new sites to tick off without having to leave the house. Each of these 34 has been visited by at least one community member; Dholavira proved to be the most difficult with 2 visitors so far claiming it. Zoe had the most of these 34 (25), followed by Thomas and Stanislaw with 17 each. Check the Top 50 scorers here .

Among the Top 10 travellers, Thomas has gained the most ground in the past year. Mikko has reclaimed his spot in the Top 10, due to his good score at the 2020/2021 WHC. Luis Filipe Gaspar banked over 80 and is close to the Top 10 now.

Wiki defines Erotic Art as “a broad field of the visual arts including any artistic work intended to evoke erotic arousal , usually depicting human nudity and/or sexual activity .” We’ve had a connection about it for a long time, bringing together WHS where examples of Erotic Art can be seen. Both “Erotic” and “Art” have to be taken broadly here: it includes what we now consider overtly sexual depictions or symbols, but weren’t necessarily seen as such when they were made. The Meaning of Erotic Art seems to be a popular study object, shown by the number of Wikipedia pages and scientific articles devoted to it. Using these sources, I have been able to add some additional sites to the existing connection and better describe the ones that were already there.

Prehistory

Erotic Art is of all times, and the earliest examples can be seen in Rock Art across the world. While Tsodilo ’s “Dancing Penises” may just be geometric designs, the Saharan sites of Tassili n'Ajjer and Tadrart Acacus hold numerous examples of explicit rock paintings. The artists specialized in depicting men with large or erect penises. <here is where I disappeared into …

Years ago we had a book section on this website. It fell victim to one of the many refurbishments, mostly because its content was quite static. However, books about UNESCO World Heritage Sites and the process around it keep on being published, and I have reviewed a number of them recently in blog posts. So I thought it would be a good idea to revive the “ Resources about WHS ” corner and extend it to include more contemporary media such as videos and podcasts.

Books

The Book section is an extension of the original listings from 2005. Recent notable additions include a new publication on India’s 38 WHS and an ethnographic study of the World Heritage arena. You can sort them by country or year of publication.

The selection will be limited to studies about the World Heritage Process, generic overviews of WHS in countries, or volumes by theme (such as forests, coastal sites). It does not include site-specific books without a WH angle – it would be too much to include every book ever made about the Colosseum for example. It's also not meant to be an all-encompassing inventory, you can do …

The Serra de Tramuntana is a beautiful landscape with steep mountainsides and lots of greenery. Like the rest of Mallorca, it is quite tourist trappy - so expect no lost paradise. An easy way to get to know the area is to take bus 203 from Palma. This is the ‘slow’ bus, that reaches the coastal town of Port de Soller after 1h20 min. It passes through the mountain villages of Valldemossa and Deia, and crosses large parts of the Serra de Tramuntana. These are narrow mountain roads, where two buses cannot pass each other. The stone villages seem glued to the steep mountain walls, that are so characteristic of this area. Near the coast, you can see dramatic cliffs.

The Serra is popular for hiking, even attracting long-distance hikers for a long weekend trip from Northern Europe. Since there are many daily flights from anywhere in Europe to Palma de Mallorca it is very accessible; from Palma it takes only 45 minutes by direct bus and then you are in the middle of this mountainous region. Crossing the mountain range on foot from west to east via the GR221 “Dry Stone Route” takes …

Iraq’s WHS have seriously been underreviewed at this website: Ashur and Babylon so far had none, Samarra showed one visit from 1975, and Hatra had only reports by 2 US military personnel. While Iraqi Kurdistan has been easily accessible for the past 10 years or so, Iraq “proper” is now opening up more as well, aided by the introduction of a visa-on-arrival for nationals of 38 countries . The area around Baghdad is deemed safe enough, but what about the ancient cities around Mosul? Wojciech Fedoruk and Thomas Buechler put WH travel in Iraq to the test a few weeks ago. They've written reviews of the sites they managed to visit (spoiler alert: they reached all 6!) and share more stories below.

What’s the most efficient itinerary along Iraq’s 6 WHS?

Wojciech: “I planned to cover all Iraqi WHS within 7 days and it worked very well. It is recommended to start from Iraq ‘proper’: a visa issued in Baghdad is respected in Kurdistan, but the one issued in Kurdistan is valid only there, so you’d have to pay twice:

• Day one – early arrival at Baghdad airport, taxi to Babylon WHS , …

Talayotic Minorca is Spain's submission for 2022. The revised documents are now available from the excellent nomination website . They’ve even added an Epic Subtitle : “Talayotic Menorca - A cyclopean island odyssey”. The 25 locations have been decreased to 9, but that’s just a cosmetic adjustment as the former locations are now bundled into clusters. Only the Torre del Ram near Ciutadella has not survived the cut. As far as I can see all suggestions made by ICOMOS during the Deferral of 2017 have been incorporated. All but one that is: the Necropolis at Son Real on the neighboring island of Mallorca has not been included. The Minorcans seem to want a WHS all for themselves! The process has cost 1 million EUR already.

None of the sites lie particularly convenient to be explored by public transport. The best ones for that would be Trepuco (cluster 8), about 3km from the nearest bus stop in Mahon, and Torralba d’en Salort (cluster 6) which lies about 4km from Alaior. One could also take a taxi to one of the sites and then walk back. Menorcaarqueologica does offer guided hiking along some of the sites with …

In memory of my recent trip to Kyrgyzstan , I decided to pimp up our Silk Road connection . We gathered no less than 51 connected sites over the years, most of them lacking proper explanations. However, when I tried to apply a structured approach to it I failed miserably. I got lost in the muddy waters of scientific definitions, ancient legends, and modern tourism marketing surrounding the ‘Silk Roads’ brand. So my goal became to make sense of it all, explain more, and judge less. The updated connection contains 69 WHS.

The issues

Finding the ultimate resource for this ‘WHS and Silk Road’ subject was already a quest. I started with the ICOMOS thematic study dating from 2014. However, it also struggled with setting boundaries and took a narrow approach to end up near its own goal (find a subdivision of Silk Road Sites for serial nominations). On the other side of the spectrum is the UNESCO Silk Roads Programme: a broad initiative where it seems that if you think you belong here, you can join. Of great help was this older Silk Road topic at our Forum. I also …

The restrictions that came with the Covid pandemic have forced the travel blog community almost to a standstill. Most bloggers fell silent altogether, some started writing about places in their immediate surroundings (“20 Fun Things to do in Utrecht”), others have used the focus time for writing a book. One of the latter is Australian Michael Turtle , who is active in this WH community as well (currently ranked #96). He has just published a book called: Great World Wonders: 100 Remarkable World Heritage Sites .

How it looks

I bought the hardcover version, which at 282 pages and a 26x20cm size felt like receiving a brick of stone when delivered.

The 100 featured WHS are grouped by themes, which are somewhere in between our categories and connections . They include for example “Homes of the rich and famous”, "Science and Technology" and “At the movies”.

Each selected WHS has its own 2 pages of dedicated content: a textual description of about 400 words, accompanied by 3 to 5 photos. These introductions are mostly of a generic kind and rarely refer to the author’s experiences at the …