World Heritage List UNESCO’s World Heritage List (WHL) includes over 900 sites and landscapes distributed throughout the world, selected by UNESCO for having an outstanding significance that transcends cultural boundaries and will persist down the generations into the future. The majority are cultural properties, but some are natural places and a few are recognized in both respects. To be selected, not only must a site be important but also a plan must be presented and endorsed by the relevant country for its maintenance and exploitation.

The concept of ‘Outstanding Universal Value’ (OUV), value that transcends cultural boundaries and will persist indefinitely into the future, is fundamental in UNESCO’s efforts to identify cultural sites worthy of inclusion on the World Heritage List. Basically, OUV is the term of recognition for the value cultural or natural properties need to manifest in order to be inscribed on the WHL.

Astronomical heritage offers a profound new vision that has important implications for the more effective implementation of the World Heritage Convention and for helping State Parties create credible nomination dossiers. It raises valuable new heritage concepts, combines different categories of cultural heritage in previously unrecognised and unexplored ways, and highlights hitherto unrecognised types of linkage between cultural and natural heritage. The principal aspects of this vision are applicable more broadly to science heritage in general, and indeed also to technology heritage.

Sites connected to astronomy that are already on the World Heritage List

Members of the IAU’s International Working Group on Astronomy and World Heritage have examined the World Heritage List for sites that are connected to astronomy. The resulting list is shown below. What perhaps stands out most is that the great majority of the sites listed are not related to modern scientific astronomy or its history.