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 (left) in front of Gorham's Cave Complex in Gibraltar

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 trips done in the past, Iain must have …

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 …

When you would have asked me 15-20 years ago what my favorite country was, I certainly would have answered: “Nepal”. I loved its mountainous setting, its chaotic but colorful towns, the sense of adventure in the air. In 2001 I spent a month backpacking all across the country, after having made an inaugural visit in 1993. One of the stops on that one month trip was the town of Tansen: little visited by foreigners at the time and still off the beaten track in 2020. It has been lingering on Nepal’s Tentative List since 2008 under the title of ‘ The Medieval Town of Tansen ’ and has since been unreviewed.

Tansen was the capital of the medieval kingdom of Palpa, an important place during a period when Nepal was not unified yet and its current territory was covered by separate kingdoms. Later on, in the 18th century, it became an important Newari bazaar town on the trade route between India and Tibet. It was only incorporated into the unified Nepali kingdom in 1806.

It lies in southwestern Nepal and in 2001 I reached it by public bus from Lumbini …

The Historic Center of Sarlat has been on France’s Tentative List since 2002. It lies in the Dordogne, in the same general area as the already inscribed Vézère Valley . Sarlat is considered to be one of the towns most representative of 14th century France, as modern times largely have passed it by and its historic district was ‘saved’ from destruction in the 1960’s by then French Minister of Culture André Malraux.

My visit was a very short one: I stayed there overnight during my visit to the Vézère Valley, but had little time to explore Sarlat itself. I did a quick dash into the city center on Saturday evening, just to get a feel for it and search for a restaurant. I wasn’t succesful with the latter: about half of the restaurants were closed for winter season and the other half were fully booked. The regional specialities here are duck breast and foie gras (the town even boasts a statue of 3 geese), so I can’t say this was really a disappointment as both food options do not appeal to me much.

What stood out was how dark the historic centre was. Except for …

The Vézère Valley was my last WHS ‘to do’ in mainland France. In preparation I found it difficult to get a good overview of the Vézère locations, especially for a visit out of season. So I made a spreadsheet to come to terms with the different access policies. It turns out that 2 out of the 15 locations are permanently closed to visitors, 6 aren’t open during winter months and the others … well, lots of oddities there as well. A general warning: always check the opening hours on the French section of the respective official website, as they may not always update the English version.

I started my visit with a pilgrimage to Lascaux I – the original Lascaux cave. It has been closed off to visitors since 1963, but on Google Streetview I noticed that a paved road runs along its entrance. I left my car at the entrance to Lascaux II and went on further exploration on foot. The whole area was eerily quiet and there are a lot of No Entry signs, but accessing this road seems to be OK. What you’ll find in the …