PARIS, FRANCE.- Eighteen new sites have been just added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List, bringing the total number of protected properties to 830. These sites not only fulfill scientific criteria necessary for inscription in the List, they are also places that are alive and tell their own stories.

The agave cutters in Jalisco Mexico may not hear the news. It will probably have little impact on the harvest of the “piña”, used to make tequila. Yet on 12 July, the agave landscape and the old Tequila industrial installations were inscribed in UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

This Mexican landscape is one of the 18 sites proclaimed by the World Heritage Committee, in Vilnius (Lithuania) from 8 to 16 July. The Convention concerning the protection of the world cultural and natural heritage, adopted in 1972 by UNESCO, now recognizes 830 properties of “outstanding universal value”. Given that there are 1500 sites on the waiting list, the number of the chosen may seem modest. In fact, it shows the Committee’s resolution in recent years to reduce inflation in the number of inscriptions.

The latest proclamation also reflects the general composition of the List, which has included a majority of cultural sites from the beginning. There are actually 644 cultural properties versus 162 natural and 24 mixed (both natural and cultural). This year too, the cultural sites bagged the lion’s share. The List is enriched by several more archeological properties with the Bistun (Islamic Republic of Iran) bas-reliefs. Sculpted on an imposing cliff-face, the most famous of the bas-reliefs was executed in 521 BC at the order of the Achaemenid king, Darius I, to celebrate his victory against an enemy. An inscription in three languages – Elamite, neo-Babylonian and old Persian – is engraved along the carved panels. It represents the only text by an Achaemenid king relating to an event that marked his reign. It is furthermore thanks to this inscription that a British officer in the 19th century was able to decipher old Persian cuneiform script, in the same way that Champollion had solved the mystery of hieroglyphics with the Rosetta stone.

Another site singled out: the historical town of Harar, in Ethiopia. Perched at an altitude of more than 1800 metres, it was once the gateway to Abyssinia. The fortified wall four metres high that still encircles the town testifies to the conflicts that began in the 16th century between the independent Muslim kingdom and the Christian emperors holding sway over the country. Although traders’ caravans from the Abyssinian mountains or the Gulf of Aden trading posts no longer come as before to sell coffee or ivory, Harar remains a noisy and vibrant town where commerce still holds an important place.

Following a noticeable trend in the last few years, the List is giving greater recognition to recent heritage. An example is the Biscay Bridge, in the Spanish Basque country. The metallic construction was made to join the opposite banks of the Nervión river, in Bilbao, without obstructing boat navigation. To meet the double challenge, the engineer Martín Alberto de Palacio y Elissague innovated: he designed the world’s first bridge equipped with a gondola.

It was in the 19th century too that the Mexican valleys of Jalisco saw the development of distilleries for making Tequila, the incendiary beverage depicted by Hollywood. With the selection of the cultural landscape of the Jalisco valleys, the entire kingdom of agave is crowned.

As the first legal instrument to protect both cultural and natural properties, the Convention also defends assets such as the Great Barrier Reef (Australia) or the Everglades National Park (United States). This year, 2 natural properties were added to the List. Among them is the Giant Panda reserve in Sichuan, China. The reserve is one of the few places in the world where these animals, 12 million years old, still live in the wild. Their situation is most precarious, however, with only 1500 individuals remaining of this endangered species.