At the start of the 2020/2021 winter season I set myself the goal to visit all national parks in The Netherlands . There are 21 of them. The quest so far (I am currently at 12 out of 21) has resulted in wet feet caused by peat bogs, a growing ability to recognize common waterbirds and encounters with out-of-place mammal species such as the Konik .

One of those national parks is ‘Dunes of Texel’, located on the largest and touristically most developed Dutch island in the Wadden Sea: Texel. It overlaps partly with the Wadden Sea WHS , so last Sunday I combined the two destinations into a day trip. It was my first visit to this island.

How to get there

Texel lies only 2.5 km north of the mainland. A 20 minute ferry ride from Den Helder is necessary to get there. Ferries leave every hour and even every half hour during the summer time. You can take a car with you or walk on. There are public buses on both sides, so also when you’re limited to public transport it will be easy. On the island itself a bike can …

Books about WHS are few and far between. Of course there are plenty that feature single sites, but putting a group of WHS into perspective is rare. In 2019 Vanda Claudino-Sales (a geography researcher from Brazil) compiled “ Coastal World Heritage Sites ”. I was happy to contribute a few photos to her book and was given a digital copy of it in return. However it took me until the Second Lockdown and rainy days around Christmas 2020 to find the time to fully read it. The book (aimed at the scientific coastal community) is a bit dry, but it stems from meticulous research and provides lots of tidbits that we can dwell on.

World Coastal Heritage List

The author presents her own World Coastal Heritage list: natural and mixed WHS that include both purely marine sites as well as terrestrial sites with coastal segments. She found 84 of them in 48 countries. This up to and including the WHC of 2017. In 2018 (none) and 2019 ( French Austral lands , Migratory Bird Sanctuaries , Paraty , Vatnajökull ) I count 4 more coastal sites that could be added. UNESCO has its similar marine programme by the way, where …

2020 was the year of closed borders and stay at home orders. It also was the year without a WHC meeting, so no bonus ‘ticks’ for our community members coming from fresh WHS they visited before. Still, we found our ways to travel and keep this website alive.

The impact on our travels

Which members of the top 50 have added to their numbers significantly since March , when the WHO called the outbreak a global pandemic?

• Not too many movements in the Top 10. Probably because most of the people in there are older; also it is hard to add lots of new WHS after you’ve reached a certain threshold. I came out ‘best’, with +9 new WHS divided among 5 countries and 2 continents.
• Of those ranked numbers 11-20, Luis Filipe Gaspar banked +40, although I suspect this was an administrative catch-up. Fan Yibo had +8 with Chinese WHS, Stanislaw Warwas +14 including Turkey, Szucs Tamas +8 including the Greek Islands.
• Among the ones ranked 21-50, the following managed to clock 10 or more: Jarek +23 (13 in …

This week it has been reported that Ukraine plans to fast track Chernobyl for WH status. For someone my age it brings back memories from the Cold War, with news about the nuclear disaster seeping slowly through the Iron Curtain in 1986. In the WH nomination pipeline also are Gdansk Shipyard (in the TWHS description referred to as symbolizing “the end of the Cold War”) and the Korean DMZ (“the DMZ is a symbolic space of the inter-Korean cold war” ( source )). Post-War era and Cold War sites were considered underrepresented in the ICOMOS Filling the gaps analysis from 2004, so we can expect more of them to come.

The Cold War “was a period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union and the United States and their respective allies, the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc, after World War II. … the period is generally considered to span the 1947 Truman Doctrine to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union” ( wiki ). Related WHS which we grouped into a connection include venues where summits between the parties were organized, nuclear testing sites and strategic military locations. These links are mostly by coincidence, so …

A few weeks ago I wrote about my foray into Sinology ; after I quit, I went on to study (and finish) Modern and Socio-Economic History. I wrote my master thesis about the Abolishment of Slavery on Curacao. I re-read it before visiting the TWHS Plantations in West Curacao as it is so close to this subject. The slave plantation society at Curacao was atypical, as the island’s soil is not fertile and did not provide enough to make the export of crops profitable. So its mixed produce was mostly eaten by the local population. The plantation owners often had a job in the city as well.

This TWHS has been quite high in the ranking of future Dutch WHS (2019 was once named as the year that it should happen), but doubts have risen and it has been suggested to the Curacao government to think about joining a serial transnational nomination or even seek an extension of the Willemstad WHS (on similar grounds as Trinidad and the Valle de los Ingenios ). I have not been able to find any news on its status beyond 2015.

Nevertheless, I looked forward to a visit during …

Curacao holds the WHS where I could finally “finish” the Netherlands: the " Historic Area of Willemstad, Inner City and Harbour ". While I already was done with the 9 other Dutch WHS in 2011, Willemstad seemed out of reach. The 10-hour flight to an island fully dedicated to mass tourism had always deterred me. During Covid times however, there are no cruise ships and the total number of monthly visitors is limited to 20,000. So it was exactly the right moment for me!

I stayed overnight for a week in the Pietermaai neighbourhood and explored the other 3 zones of the WHS on foot. I used itineraries that I found on the internet to identify the most interesting structures of Scharloo, Otrobanda and Punda.

I started in Scharloo, a neighborhood of detached 19th century residences. The place to be here is the long Scharlooweg. The stately buildings along this road now house companies and also the Swiss consulate. All are heavily secured and have gates in front. No one walked this street on a Sunday, I only met a stray dog.

The Waaigat separates Scharloo from the Punda district, the oldest part of …

When this blog post is published, I have just arrived in Curacao. Curacao is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands at the same level as the Netherlands, Aruba and Sint Maarten. It has its own currency, the Netherlands Antillean guilder. It’s a 10 hour flight from Amsterdam. Flights depart Schiphol from the non-Schengen zone. You have to show your passport to enter and to leave. However, when the Dutch Prime Minister adviced against all non-essential travel abroad during the 2nd wave of Covid, the Dutch Caribbean including Curacao was notably exempted as it was considered domestic travel.

Curacao’s only WHS, Willemstad , is included in the total Dutch count as well. It got me thinking about the odd positions of other WHS in Dependent territories. Of course we have a connection for them already!

What is a Dependent territory?

Wiki defines a Dependent territory as “a territory that does not possess full political independence or sovereignty as a sovereign state, yet remains politically outside the controlling state's integral area.”

Characteristics to look for include:

• a great degree of autonomy from its controlling state (for example having their …

During the past week Azerbaijan has replaced its TWHS “Hyrcanian State Reserve”, dating from 1998, with “ Hirkan Forests ”. This revision follows the change in the national park structure that happened in 2004 and a further enlargement of the protected area in 2008. Though it may seem like a minor administrative adjustment, a change like this usually indicates an upcoming official nomination of the site. In this case it would be an extension to the Iranian Hyrcanian Forests WHS from 2019. The new Azeri TWHS is known for its ancient, deciduous mixed broad-leaved forests - in normal language that means: trees that shed their flat, usually veined, leaves. It comprises 3 locations.

A similar, but smaller site was nominated for inclusion in the WH List already in 2006 as “Hirkan Forests of Azerbaijan”. It was Deferred at the time with the option to renominate it as part of a transnational serial property with other Hirkanian forest areas in Iran.

When I re-read that IUCN evaluation now, I see no strong argument to either include or reject it. The forests are said to be of equal importance to sites known for vascular plant diversity already …

Finland this week announced to submit “ Saimaa ringed seal habitats in Lake Saimaa archipelago ” to its Tentative List. It protects the Saimaa ringed seals, among the most endangered seals in the world with a total population of only about 400 individuals. Thanks to Sjobe we were discussing it at the Forum . Could this be the first time a WHS would aim at protecting a single sub species? I believe so – WHS protecting named mammal species aren’t that common in general and focusing on an almost extinct subspecies is unheard of.

Below I will discuss the relationship between mammals and WHS, in ascending order of importance: from (relatively special) mammal species that occur in WHS to ones that are part of the OUV of their WHS, from "flagship species" to mammals that even made it into the name of the WHS.

4. WHS with a mammal connection

We do already have individual connections for the following mammal species / families: Anteaters , Bears , Bovines , Chimpanzees , Elephants , Gorillas , Gray wolves , Jaguar , Otters , Rhinos , River dolphins , Seals (!), Siraneans , Sloths , Snow …

I hold a long fascination for China, which hit an early peak when I choose to study Sinology at University when I was 18. The course didn’t really work out for me and I quit after 2 years – I did not have the discipline at the time to put in the hours to master the language. But I have always stayed interested, do speak ‘basic Chinese’ and have now visited China 5 times. In 2007 I embarked on a 3 month solo trip across China, one of my best journeys ever. On that trip I managed to visit 20 new WHS; later WHC meetings added another 2 retroactively.

I started that journey from the Sichuan capital of Chengdu with a day trip to Sanxingdui. This Bronze Age archaeological site is now part of the Archaeological Sites of the Ancient Shu State TWHS, but wasn’t when I visited. It had rained overnight and I changed my program for the day from the WHS of Dujiangyan to the more indoor experience of the archaeological museum in Sanxingdui. There was a daily direct bus from Chengdu’s southern bus station to Sanxingdui. Unfortunately, despite a last minute taxi effort …