The former Colonies of Benevolence will be on the agenda of this year's WHC meeting. This Dutch-Flemish serial transnational proposal had been referred in 2018 due to doubts about the selection of included sites. Subsequential discussions with ICOMOS and the World Heritage Centre, who advised to “take a little more time” than usually after a Referral, has led to a reduction of the proposed locations from 7 to 3. On the Dutch side, Ommerschans and Willemsoord are omitted and Frederiksoord and Wilhelminaoord are combined. In Flanders, only Wortel is left.

I had already visited the Dutch part (notably Veenhuizen) in 2011 and the Belgian part in 2016 . With the full, amended nomination dossier now available I decided to have a closer look at the Frederiksoord-Wilhelminaoord component. It is also about the only (T)WHS related place which I have not reviewed before that I can reach at the moment – I am eagerly awaiting the lifting of the non-essential travel ban to Germany for example, for some more low hanging TWHS fruit.

I arrived early on a Sunday morning in Wilhelminaoord, where I parked my car to …

On March 10 I got an e-mail from Tamar Cassidy, owner of Sangha Lodge in the Central African Republic. It read: “Are you still OK to travel?”. I was booked for a long-awaited week at their mammalwatchers lodge in Sangha National Park starting March 24. Four other tourists from Europe had confirmed as well and we were all still willing to go despite the conditions for international travel worsening by the day. People around me said “You surely don’t want to go there now, their health system is appalling”. But my thoughts were – I wasn’t carrying the virus, the virus had not arrived in the Central African Republic yet and they worry about worse things there anyway.

The biggest new risk that I saw was not being able to get back home afterwards: the park is such an isolated place and the Central African Republic in general gets very few international flights. But what would be the damage if I had to stay there or in a neighbouring country? I would miss work for a few weeks, but I surely wouldn’t be fired …

A few weeks ago, Cambodia has added 3 of its genocide memorials to the Tentative List as a serial proposal. The sites commemorate the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime, which was overthrown in 1979. The proposal still has the cumbersome working title “ Former M-13 prison/ Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (former S-21)/ Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre (former Execution Site of S-21) ”.

I visited the former S-21 prison, now known as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, in 2007. It is located in street 113 in the heart of Phnom Penh. In 2007 it saw some 50 visitors a day, but probably this has risen over the years due to the increase in global tourism - it is one of the few obvious “things to do” in the Cambodian capital. It is also a well-known place on the Dark Tourism circuit. Unfortunately I lost most of the photos of my visit, but I do still have my diary notes and the leaflet that was handed out upon entering the site.

The prison was located in an old school building. Between 1975 and 1978, some 12,000 prisoners were detained and tortured here. When further questioning was …

Lalish Temple , the holiest place for the Yazidi community, has been added to Iraq’s Tentative List a week ago. It was one of my proposals for the Arab States Top 50 Missing , so I was very happy to see it appear in the official records as well. My support for Lalish stems from my visit to the site in March 2014. It was the highlight of my tour through Iraqi Kurdistan: an introduction to one of those mysterious, small Middle Eastern religions that somehow in isolation have survived for centuries. Only 5 months later the rest of the world came to know the Yazidis as well, however in much more unfortunate circumstances – as victims from the Sinjar massacre and the genocide of Yazidis by ISIS .

Lalish lies about an hour's drive from modern civilization (we left from Duhok). Unfortunately the place was covered in a dense fog when we arrived – apparently it has a lovely setting in a mountain valley. The rituals that are so abanduntly attached to this holy site already start when arriving in the main street …

Yesterday I received the news that Iain Jackson has passed away. Iain had been in a friendly competition with Atila Ege for the top spot of who visited the most WHS over the past years. He ended up with an amazing number of 915 visited WHS, which is even more remarkable given the strict rules he applied for himself. Iain died suddenly in his home in Edinburgh, leaving behind his wife Freda and son Euan.

Iain had been 'bagging' World Heritage Sites since late 1987, so actually well before this website started. He did so for years in isolation, until he found out that there were people like him focusing on the World Heritage List. In the mean time, Iain had made his own set of ‘rules’ about what is needed to ‘tick off’ a WHS.

That meant for example that a visit was only valid when it was done AFTER a site had been admitted to the List. While 99% of us are looking forward to each year’s WHC meeting to see which bonus WHS they will get this year from …

I am not much of a film fanatic, so I cannot really relate to the film connections like James Bond in movies that we have on this website. What I do enjoy however is a a good documentary (also in books I like non-fiction more than fiction by the way). Fortunately we have a connection for documentaries too: WHS that have been used as a location for documentaries of high public and/or critical acclaim .

Earlier we already discovered the following WHS that fit into this connection:

• Shoah by Claude Lanzmann (1985), Auschwitz is 1 of 4 filming locations ( Auschwitz Birkenau )
• Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog (2010) ( Decorated cave of Pont d'Arc )
• Virunga (2014), an Oscar-nominated documentary film directed by Orlando von Einsiedel ( Virunga )
• Free Solo (2018): profiles rock climber Alex Honnold on his quest to perform a free solo climb of El Capitan ( Yosemite )

Diving a bit deeper into the subject and sifting through lists like Wiki’s List of documentary films and a Top 50 best documentaries from the Guardian , I came upon much more WHS we …

Uzbekistan is an unmissable destination for any serious traveller, mainly for its monumental and well-preserved architectural heritage. Next to the famous higlights such as Samarkand and Bukhara , there are a number of lesser known sights that I would not hesitate to propose to for example a “Missing Top 50 Asia” list. One of those is the Bahoutdin Complex , a group of Sufi funeral and religious monuments some 10 km outside of the city of Bukhara.

Bahoutdin Naqshaband was a 14th century Sunni Sufi saint. He was the founder of the Naqshbandi order, and was considered the spiritual patron of Bukhara governors. His order became influential as far as India, Dagestan (Russia), Syria, Egypt and China. Therefore, his tomb remains the most esteemed in Uzbekistan and attracts visitors from other Islamic countries as well. It apparently is nicknamed "Mecca of Central Asia".

The tomb is part of a large memorial and religious complex, with constructions from different periods in time starting from 1544. The complex has been renovated in 1993 with Turkish and Pakistani funding, after it had been abandoned during Soviet times. When I visited (in May 2010) it was busy with …

In February I visited the Font de Gaume Cave in the Vézère Valley . The number of visitors per day here is strictly regulated and they handle this in an old school way: on a strict in person first come first serve basis. They have painted numbers on the benches outside the entrance (unprotected against wind and rain), where you are supposed to sit. You cannot hold a seat for another person. So if you are willing to get up early, physically able to sit on a hard bench for at least 1.5 hours and brave the weather - you will get the privilege to buy a ticket.

And of course there are WHS with health and environment related restrictions. Or sites that have limited access to followers of a specific religion or gender . We do have a connection for the more serious cases of unusual entry requirements though: WHS which, either permanently or on occasion, require intending visitors to pass "tests" before entry is granted. Sometimes they ask you to do real odd things:

Bahá’i Gardens in Haifa (Israel)

In the Bahá’i Gardens visitors are allowed only to descend the …

The “ Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie ” (New Dutch Waterline) is a proposed extension to the Defence Line of Amsterdam , which will be discussed at the 2020 WHC . It comprises another series of defense works, stretching out a further 85km from the southeast of the Defence Line of Amsterdam across the province of Utrecht into Gelderland and Noord-Brabant. Both used water – a 50cm layer of it, “too shallow for ships and too deep for men on horses” - to keep invaders out. The new name of the combined WHS shall become: “Dutch Water Defence Lines”.

The New Dutch Waterline actually is the better known part of the two among the general public. I had visited one of its components before – Loevestein Castle , one of the most interesting castles in Holland – but last week I headed out for a hike in the area of Fort Ruigenhoek. Ruigenhoek and 3 other forts in the vicinity were especially built to protect the city of Utrecht, which established itself more and more as a railway infrastructure hub in the 19th century. These forts replaced an earlier defence line which had become too close to the …

The Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales is the UK’s nomination for 2021. It will be a serial site with 7 components. Each of the components consists of a number of ‘elements’ – the most noteworthy “physical features which embody the attributes of Outstanding Universal value”. That value is to be found in (ii) the technology transfer to continental Europe and the USA, (iv) the dramatic impact of large-scale exploitation of natural resources and (v) the legacy of the industrial workers and their settlements. Its official name has been changed from “Slate Industry ..” to “Slate Landscape”, obviously emphasizing the cultural landscape approach.

I visited one of the components, the town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, on my way to the Gwynedd Castles in 2011. I’ve got a couple of photos left, but I must admit that I did not write up anything about the side trip and I can remember almost zero. What I see when I look at those photos again is a town that could only be in the UK: straight rows of similar stone houses (cheap housing for the quarrymen), a fish and chip shop, an Anglican church (they call it “Church of Wales” over …