The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Yet more great reasons to reach for your passport
From Iran’s historic city of Yazd to Los Alerces National Park in Argentina, Chris Leadbeater finds travel inspiration in this year’s Unesco World Heritage list
It can resemble a most haphazard series of coronations – of kings both magnificent and miniature. The annual announcement of the new set of sites receiving Unesco World Heritage status – a declaration which occurs every July (whc.unesco.org) – tends to stir feelings of both familiarity and bemusement. Some landmarks granted a rubber stamp of quality by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation – to use its full title – seem like unquestionable candidates for this seal of approval. Some seem so deserving of official respect that you wonder why they haven’t been heralded before. And others make you pause for a moment, consult a map – and wonder who would really go there.
The 2017 roll-call is no different. In all, 26 locations are being handed their Unesco orb and sceptre. Some are crucial nuggets of yesteryear in France, Turkey, Croatia, Italy and Iran. Some exist as astonishing slices of landscape and nature in the UK, China and Argentina. Others, though, are likely to spark wanderlust only in travellers who prefer to abandon the beaten track. While all 26 are worthy of their recognition as places of global significance, some of them are either too dangerous to visit at present (the old town of Hebron in Palestine; the savannah of Burkina Faso), still too remote for conventional holiday touring (the Qinghai Hoh Xil high plateau in western China; the Daurian Steppes of eastern Mongolia and Russian Siberia; the Kujataa farmscape of Greenland) or so entirely niche that a trip to go in search of them might seem an act of wilful obscurity (the Tarnowskie Gory Lead-Silver-Zinc Mine in the Upper Silesia region of southern Poland).
Still, there is plenty in this latest Unesco mission statement to make people reach for their passports. And the tours that follow are all routes to glimpsing these new monarchs enthroned.