The UNESCO International Day for Monuments and Sites has existed since 1982. It consists of highlighting the richness of the world’s cultural and natural heritage and focusing on the protection and restoration of many monuments and/or national parks.
While many of us have been locked down for several weeks, CartoVista has decided to map and celebrate the diversity of these sites. The goal is to allow you to travel around the world from your computer, view photos of these magical places, see them face to face with the StreetView feature and learn about them with the help of summary descriptions and the different themes on the map. Click on the map and explore the different themes.
Criteria and types of sites
CartoVista allows you to discover all the sites and monuments listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites with photos and descriptions. In parallel, the map highlights the type of site (Natural, Cultural, Mixed) with different symbols and the criteria that allowed their inclusion with a colour variable.
Cultural sites must meet at least 1 of the 6 criteria listed by UNESCO. As for natural sites, they must meet at least 1 of the 4 criteria listed by UNESCO. Finally, the mixed sites must have at least 1 criterion out of the 10 in total. These criteria are listed here: criteria list.
Endangered sites
In addition, CartoVista wanted to show with this map that some monuments or natural sites can be endangered by human actions (wars, global warming, urban development, deforestation etc.). Thus, the CartoVista team has represented the sites considered endangered by UNESCO with a red symbol graded according to the date of their entry into this “danger” category. The blue symbols show the sites that have been removed from this category.
Sites by country
This theme shows the number of sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List by country as well as their density (per 10 000 km²).