Over the past few years I seem to have accidentally ended up at quite a few UNESCO World Heritage sites. As usual with things like this, I can’t resist making a list and trying to tick off the rest! UNESCO specify each site as being Cultural, Natural or Mixed – the plan was originally to do only the Natural ones, but that seems like cheating. Plus, the Cultural ones must be reasonably interesting to get WH status, so they’re probably worth taking a look at anyway. Here’s the full UK list to start. I’ll let you work out the colour scheme as to which ones I’ve visited and which I haven’t.

• Castles and Town Walls of King Edward in Gwynedd (1986)
• Durham Castle and Cathedral (1986)
• Giant’s Causeway and Causeway Coast (1986)
• Ironbridge Gorge (1986)
• St Kilda (1986, 2004, 2005)
• Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites (1986)
• Studley Royal Park including the Ruins of Fountains Abbey (1986)
• Blenheim Palace (1987)
• City of Bath (1987)
• Frontiers of the Roman Empire (1987, 2005,2008)
• Westminster Palace, Westminster Abbey and Saint Margaret’s Church (1987)
• Canterbury Cathedral, St Augustine’s Abbey, and St Martin’s Church (1988)
• Henderson Island (1988)
• Tower of London (1988)
• Gough and Inaccessible Islands (1995, 2004)
• Old and New Towns of Edinburgh (1995)
• Maritime Greenwich (1997)
• Heart of Neolithic Orkney (1999)
• Blaenavon Industrial Landscape (2000)
• Historic Town of St George and Related Fortifications, Bermuda (2000)
• Derwent Valley Mills (2001)
• Dorset and East Devon Coast (2001)
• New Lanark (2001)
• Saltaire (2001)
• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (2003)
• Liverpool – Maritime Mercantile City (2004)
• Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape (2006)
• Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and Canal (2009)

Looks like I’ll have to suffer a trip to Bermuda at some point. I’ll be honest, the one that’s worrying me most is “Gough and Inaccessible Islands” – to get an idea of why they’re called the Inaccessible Islands, check out this Google Map (you’ll probably need to zoom out. A lot.):

View Larger Map

Strangely, I seem to have racked up as many globally as in the UK [2020 UPDATE: global count has now exceeded the UK!], the list so far being:

• Belgium – Historic Centre of Brugge
• Canada – Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks
• Czech Republic – Historic Centre of Prague
• Czech Republic – Kutná Hora: Historical Town Centre with the Church of St Barbara and the Cathedral of Our Lady at Sedlec
• France – Paris, Banks of the Seine
• Greece – Acropolis, Athens
• Greece – Medieval City of Rhodes
• Hungary – Budapest, including the Banks of the Danube, the Buda Castle Quarter and Andrássy Avenue
• Iceland- Þingvellir National Park
• Ireland- Skellig Michael
• Italy – Venice and its Lagoon
• Netherlands – Seventeenth-Century Canal Ring Area of Amsterdam inside the Singelgracht
• New Zealand – Tongariro National Park
• New Zealand – Te Wahipounamu – South West New Zealand
• Portugal – Historic Centre of Oporto
• Portugal – Laurisilva of Madeira
• Slovakia – Levoča, Spišský Hrad and the Associated Cultural Monuments
• Slovakia – Caves of Aggtelek Karst and Slovak Karst
• Slovenia – Škocjan Caves
• Spain – Palau de la Música Catalana and Hospital de Sant Pau, Barcelona
• Spain – Works of Antoni Gaudí
• Switzerland – Rhaetian Railway in the Albula / Bernina Landscapes
• United States of America – Grand Canyon National Park
• United States of America – Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park
• United States of America – Yosemite National Park

You can view any blog posts with the UNESCO keyword by clicking here. Both nationally and internationally I’ve not included ones I’ve been past but not into (primarily cultural ones such as Mont-Saint-Michel). Annoyingly, it seems I was within a few miles of one in Andorra several years back, but was blissfully unaware at the time! UNESCO have their own interactive map, which is quite good. Anyway, I’ll update this page as we go along…