Cultural Landscapes
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Cultural Landscapes
Cultural landscapes are places where human societies and the natural environment have interacted over time to create distinctive combinations of land, water, settlements, vegetation, architecture, livelihoods, traditions, beliefs, and ecological systems. They can include agricultural valleys, Indigenous territories, sacred mountains, historic gardens, industrial districts, archaeological landscapes, pastoral regions, mining areas, river corridors, vineyards, forests, settlements, and urban parks.
The concept challenges the traditional separation between cultural heritage and nature conservation. A cultural landscape is not simply scenery surrounding a historic monument. Its significance may lie in the relationships among physical features, ecological processes, human activities, traditional knowledge, memories, spiritual associations, and patterns of land use.
UNESCO's recognition of cultural landscapes expanded the international understanding of heritage by acknowledging places created through the combined works of nature and humankind. National heritage agencies, researchers, Indigenous communities, conservation organizations, and planners have since developed increasingly sophisticated approaches to identifying, documenting, protecting, and managing these landscapes.
Cultural landscapes are also living places. Many remain inhabited, cultivated, grazed, harvested, worshipped in, visited, or otherwise actively used. Their preservation therefore requires more than freezing a landscape at a particular point in history. Effective conservation often depends on maintaining the practices, communities, ecological relationships, and knowledge systems that created the landscape.
Understanding Cultural Landscapes
Cultural landscapes can take many forms. Some have been deliberately designed, such as gardens, parks, palace grounds, ceremonial avenues, and planned urban landscapes. Others evolved gradually through agriculture, settlement, grazing, forestry, mining, water management, transportation, or other human activities.
Historic vernacular landscapes often developed without formal designers. Their character emerged through generations of farming, building, movement, resource use, and adaptation to local environmental conditions. Fields, walls, paths, irrigation systems, orchards, villages, forests, pastures, and waterways may collectively tell a history that cannot be understood by examining individual structures in isolation.
Associative landscapes derive much of their importance from cultural, spiritual, artistic, historical, or symbolic relationships with particular places. Mountains, rivers, forests, caves, deserts, coastlines, and other natural features may have profound significance even where relatively little built infrastructure exists.
Indigenous cultural landscapes frequently extend beyond conventional archaeological sites or property boundaries. They can encompass territories connected through seasonal movement, hunting, fishing, gathering, ceremonies, oral histories, sacred places, kinship relationships, ecological knowledge, and continuing systems of stewardship.
A single landscape may belong to several categories simultaneously. It may be agricultural and sacred, designed and ecological, industrial and residential, or archaeological while remaining culturally important to contemporary communities.
Cultural Landscapes as Living Heritage
Many cultural landscapes are important precisely because they continue to function.
Rice terraces depend on irrigation systems, community organization, farming knowledge, forest management, and continued cultivation. Vineyard landscapes depend on generations of specialized knowledge concerning soils, slopes, climate, plant varieties, property patterns, and production. Pastoral landscapes can depend on seasonal livestock movement, traditional grazing systems, pathways, water sources, and customary rights.
Historic orchards provide another example. Fruit trees, planting patterns, irrigation systems, roads, buildings, and farming practices can survive as living historical resources. Continued cultivation may preserve heritage more effectively than simply maintaining abandoned trees as static artifacts.
Living cultural landscapes therefore raise a fundamental conservation question: should heritage management preserve only the physical appearance of a landscape, or should it also preserve the activities that created and sustain it?
Increasingly, cultural-landscape conservation recognizes that traditional practices, livelihoods, skills, institutions, and community relationships may be as important as buildings and monuments.
Indigenous, Sacred, and Community Landscapes
Indigenous landscapes demonstrate particularly clearly why cultural heritage cannot always be separated from ecology.
Places such as Uluru-Kata Tjuta, Pimachiowin Aki, Budj Bim, Writing-on-Stone, Papahānaumokuākea, the Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests, the ǂKhomani Cultural Landscape, and numerous other Indigenous cultural landscapes embody relationships among territory, ancestors, plants, animals, water, spiritual traditions, subsistence practices, movement, ceremony, and ecological knowledge.
The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape in Australia preserves a sophisticated Gunditjmara aquaculture system involving channels, wetlands, dams, and other infrastructure used to manage aquatic resources. Pimachiowin Aki in Canada represents an Anishinaabe landscape in which forests, waterways, wildlife, sacred places, livelihood practices, and Indigenous stewardship remain interconnected.
The Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests of coastal Kenya demonstrate how ecological conservation may be inseparable from customary institutions and spiritual traditions. Sacred groves survive not simply because they contain important vegetation but because communities have maintained cultural rules, beliefs, histories, and responsibilities associated with them.
Recognition of Indigenous cultural landscapes can also challenge conventional heritage-management systems. Indigenous understandings of landscape may emphasize relationships, mobility, memory, seasonality, ancestry, and responsibility rather than fixed boundaries and individual sites.
For this reason, meaningful protection increasingly requires participation by Indigenous peoples and local communities rather than relying exclusively on outside experts.
Agricultural and Pastoral Cultural Landscapes
Agriculture has created some of the world's most extensive cultural landscapes.
Terraced mountains, irrigated rice fields, vineyards, orchards, grazing lands, oases, traditional farms, and agroforestry systems reflect generations of adaptation to soil, climate, water availability, topography, and local ecosystems.
The Honghe Hani Rice Terraces in China combine forests, villages, irrigation systems, livestock, aquatic species, rituals, and thousands of mountain terraces. Bali's Subak landscape similarly links water temples, cooperative irrigation institutions, rice production, watershed management, and a philosophy connecting people, spirituality, and nature.
The Konso Cultural Landscape in Ethiopia demonstrates adaptation to difficult environmental conditions through terraced agriculture, fortified settlements, stone construction, water systems, communal organization, and cultural traditions.
European vineyard landscapes such as Burgundy, Champagne, Saint-Emilion, Tokaj, Piedmont, Lavaux, and the Alto Douro illustrate another type of long-term cultural adaptation. Geology, property boundaries, settlements, transportation, agricultural expertise, architecture, and commercial networks combine to create landscapes with distinctive regional identities.
Pastoral landscapes likewise reflect continuing interactions among people, animals, vegetation, water, climate, and movement. Transhumance routes, grazing systems, seasonal settlements, livestock breeds, pathways, and customary institutions can all form part of their heritage value.
These landscapes show that food production itself can be a form of cultural heritage.
Biodiversity and Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Cultural landscapes can contain considerable biological diversity.
Traditional farming and pastoral systems often produce mosaics of fields, forests, hedgerows, wetlands, pastures, orchards, woodlands, and settlements. This landscape heterogeneity can provide habitats for a wide range of plants and animals.
Research on traditional European farming landscapes has found connections between low-intensity agriculture, wood pastures, habitat mosaics, cultural traditions, and biodiversity. Indigenous land-management systems can likewise contribute to ecological diversity through fire management, harvesting practices, succession management, seasonal movement, and other forms of ecological stewardship.
Historic landscapes may therefore provide lessons for contemporary sustainability.
Traditional ecological knowledge developed through long-term observation of soils, plants, animals, weather, water, fire, and seasonal cycles can contribute to conservation and climate adaptation. However, such knowledge is often threatened when rural populations decline, farming becomes more intensive, customary institutions weaken, or younger generations leave traditional livelihoods.
Protecting a cultural landscape may consequently require protecting both biodiversity and the social systems that maintain it.
Designed and Urban Cultural Landscapes
Not all cultural landscapes evolved gradually. Many were deliberately designed.
Historic gardens, royal estates, parks, boulevards, botanical gardens, pilgrimage complexes, and planned urban districts can express political power, religious ideas, scientific development, artistic movements, and changing relationships with nature.
West Lake in Hangzhou demonstrates centuries of deliberate modification of natural scenery through islands, causeways, gardens, temples, and viewpoints. The Garden Kingdom of Dessau-Wörlitz integrated architecture, agriculture, education, gardens, and water systems into a vast Enlightenment landscape.
The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and Singapore Botanic Gardens represent landscapes associated with botanical science, horticulture, plant exchange, conservation, and the historical development of scientific institutions.
Rio de Janeiro's cultural landscape illustrates the relationship among mountains, forests, coastline, parks, monuments, gardens, urban development, and designed views.
Urban cultural landscapes show that heritage conservation need not be limited to preserving individual historic buildings. Streets, parks, vegetation, views, waterways, public spaces, transportation networks, and relationships among neighborhoods may all contribute to the historic character of a city.
Archaeological and Industrial Landscapes
Cultural landscapes can preserve evidence of economic and technological systems extending across large areas.
Mining landscapes are particularly clear examples. The Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape, the Erzgebirge/Krušnohoří Mining Region, Roșia Montană, Blaenavon, Iwami Ginzan, Røros, and the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin include combinations of mines, quarries, settlements, roads, railways, waterways, processing sites, forests, worker housing, and transformed terrain.
These landscapes demonstrate that industrial heritage extends well beyond factories.
Transportation corridors can likewise become cultural landscapes. Quebrada de Humahuaca preserves evidence of thousands of years of movement, settlement, agriculture, exchange, and cultural interaction along an Andean route.
Archaeological landscapes such as the Bamiyan Valley, Orkhon Valley, Bhimbetka, Gobustan, and the prehistoric caves of Yagul and Mitla contain archaeological remains whose meaning depends heavily on their relationship with the surrounding environment.
Ancient agricultural landscapes can reveal some of the earliest evidence of people deliberately modifying ecosystems. Papua New Guinea's Kuk Early Agricultural Site, for example, preserves drainage systems, cultivation features, and archaeological soils documenting thousands of years of agricultural development.
Cultural Landscapes and Climate Change
Climate change has become one of the most important threats facing cultural landscapes.
Sea-level rise, flooding, drought, wildfire, extreme temperatures, erosion, changing vegetation, water scarcity, storms, and ecological change can alter both individual heritage features and entire landscape systems.
The problem is particularly complex because cultural landscapes are dynamic systems. A changing climate may affect crops, forests, grazing patterns, water supplies, traditional livelihoods, biodiversity, settlement patterns, and tourism simultaneously.
Climate adaptation therefore cannot be limited to strengthening individual historic structures.
Effective resilience planning may require landscape-scale assessments that combine ecological vulnerability, cultural significance, community knowledge, land-use planning, disaster risk, and livelihood needs.
Research also identifies institutional and governance barriers. Heritage agencies may be organized separately from environmental agencies, while climate policy, agriculture, tourism, water management, biodiversity conservation, and cultural heritage may fall under different administrative systems.
Cultural landscapes demonstrate the need for more integrated approaches.
Tourism, Development, and Economic Pressures
Tourism can support cultural-landscape conservation by generating income, employment, international recognition, and public interest.
It can also create significant pressures.
Large visitor numbers may increase construction, traffic, waste, water consumption, land prices, commercial development, and pressure on local communities. Agricultural landscapes may gradually become tourism landscapes if farming becomes less economically viable than hospitality and real-estate development.
Heritage designation itself can therefore create difficult trade-offs.
Research increasingly emphasizes tourism strategies developed with local communities rather than imposed primarily by government agencies, investors, or outside heritage organizations. Community participation can help identify which landscape characteristics are most important and which forms of economic development are compatible with maintaining them.
Agritourism may provide one pathway for sustaining some working landscapes by connecting heritage conservation with farm income. However, tourism is most likely to strengthen cultural landscapes when it helps maintain rather than replace the activities and communities that created them.
Conservation and Landscape Planning
Cultural-landscape conservation is inherently interdisciplinary.
Historical research can reconstruct past land use. Archaeology can identify earlier settlements and landscape modifications. Ecology can document vegetation, wildlife, soils, hydrology, and ecosystem change. Geography and GIS can analyze spatial patterns. Architecture and landscape architecture can study buildings, circulation systems, views, and designed features. Ethnographic research can document community relationships, traditional practices, and cultural meanings.
Digital technologies are expanding these possibilities.
GIS, historical mapping, three-dimensional visualization, spatial modeling, landscape-character assessment, and other tools can document change across large areas and help planners evaluate alternative futures.
However, technical analysis alone cannot determine what a landscape means.
Participatory planning methods increasingly bring residents, Indigenous communities, farmers, planners, conservation professionals, researchers, tourism operators, and other stakeholders into the process of identifying important landscape values and developing management strategies.
This approach recognizes that cultural landscapes are frequently inhabited places with competing interests. Conservation decisions can affect housing, agriculture, livelihoods, transportation, property rights, tourism, infrastructure, and access to natural resources.
Landscape planning therefore involves negotiation as well as preservation.
Beyond the Nature-Culture Divide
One of the most important contributions of the cultural-landscape concept is its challenge to the idea that nature and culture should always be managed separately.
Many landscapes described as natural have long histories of human influence. Indigenous burning, grazing, forestry, irrigation, farming, harvesting, hunting, settlement, and other practices have shaped ecosystems over centuries or millennia.
Conversely, many cultural landscapes depend directly on ecological processes.
A vineyard depends on soils, climate, water, vegetation, and microorganisms. A pastoral landscape depends on grasslands, livestock, water, and seasonal ecological cycles. A sacred forest depends on both cultural rules and functioning forest ecology. An irrigated rice landscape depends on watersheds, soils, forests, waterways, crops, community institutions, and traditional knowledge.
Managing only the cultural features or only the ecological features may therefore undermine the landscape as a whole.
Integrated cultural-landscape management seeks to understand these relationships rather than dividing landscapes into separate natural and cultural components.
The Future of Cultural Landscapes
Cultural landscapes face pressures from urbanization, agricultural intensification, land abandonment, population change, industrial development, tourism, infrastructure, climate change, environmental degradation, and the loss of traditional knowledge.
Some landscapes are threatened by too much human activity, while others are threatened when long-established human activities cease.
Abandoning a traditional agricultural landscape, for example, can lead to the disappearance of terraces, irrigation systems, open grasslands, orchards, pathways, ecological mosaics, farming knowledge, and community institutions. Conversely, excessive development can erase the spatial relationships that give a landscape its character.
The challenge is therefore not simply to prevent change.
Cultural landscapes have always changed.
The more difficult task is to determine which characteristics, relationships, practices, ecological processes, memories, and cultural values should continue as landscapes adapt to new environmental and social conditions.
Successful stewardship is increasingly likely to depend on cooperation among local communities, Indigenous peoples, conservationists, governments, scientists, farmers, landowners, planners, and other stakeholders.
Conclusion
Cultural landscapes reveal that human history is written not only in documents, monuments, and buildings but also across fields, forests, mountains, rivers, gardens, settlements, roads, irrigation systems, sacred places, industrial sites, and working landscapes.
They preserve evidence of how communities have adapted to environments, organized resources, produced food, created settlements, expressed spiritual beliefs, developed technologies, and constructed cultural identities.
At the same time, cultural landscapes are often important ecological systems. Traditional agriculture, Indigenous stewardship, pastoralism, forestry, water management, and other long-established practices can maintain biodiversity and provide knowledge relevant to contemporary conservation.
Their protection consequently requires a broader approach than conventional monument preservation.
Cultural landscapes are best understood as interconnected social, cultural, historical, and ecological systems. Their future depends not merely on protecting physical remains but on sustaining the relationships among people, place, knowledge, livelihood, heritage, and nature that give these landscapes meaning.
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Concepts, Definitions, Heritage Theory, and Governance
UNESCO-Greece Melina Mercouri International Prize
[UNESCO-Greece Melina Mercouri International Prize for the Safeguarding and Management of Cultural Landscapes | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | 2025]
Highlights international examples of community, institutional, and professional action to conserve living cultural landscapes and promote sustainable landscape management.
Cultural Landscapes: The Development of a National Park Service Perspective
[Cultural Landscapes: The Development of a National Park Service Perspective | Susan Dolan | National Park Service | 2025]
Reviews the evolution of the National Park Service cultural-landscape program, including the development of inventories, cultural landscape reports, professional standards, and preservation policy.
Understand Cultural Landscapes
[Understand Cultural Landscapes | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | March 8, 2024]
Explains how cultural landscapes are identified, evaluated, and protected, while comparing the National Park Service definition with broader UNESCO and landscape-conservation concepts.
Preservation Guidance
[Preservation Guidance | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | March 8, 2024]
Summarizes the principal research, planning, documentation, treatment, and stewardship tools used by the National Park Service to conserve historically significant landscapes.
Landscape Report Types
[Landscape Report Types | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | 2024]
Distinguishes Cultural Landscape Inventories from Cultural Landscape Reports and explains how these complementary tools document landscape features and establish future preservation strategies.
Cultural Landscape Categories
[Cultural Landscape Categories | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | September 20, 2023]
Describes four NPS categories—historic designed landscapes, historic vernacular landscapes, historic sites, and ethnographic landscapes—and explains how a single place may belong to several categories.
Cultural Landscapes 101
[Cultural Landscapes 101 | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | July 12, 2023]
Introduces cultural landscapes within the U.S. National Park System, including their defining characteristics, historical integrity, landscape types, and role in documenting relationships between people and environments.
Cultural Landscapes in the National Park Service: Good Root Stock
[Cultural Landscapes in the National Park Service: Good Root Stock | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | 2023]
Traces the intellectual and institutional development of cultural-landscape preservation in the United States and the growing recognition that historically important places extend beyond individual buildings.
Article 1: Cultural Landscapes
[Article 1: Cultural Landscapes | Amy Strecker | The 1972 World Heritage Convention: A Commentary, Oxford University Press | 2023]
Examines the legal and conceptual development of cultural landscapes within the World Heritage Convention and the growing recognition of communities and human-environment relationships as heritage.
Research — Cultural Landscapes
[Research — Cultural Landscapes | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | July 7, 2021]
Explains how historical, archaeological, ecological, ethnographic, horticultural, architectural, and geographic research is combined to identify landscape significance and guide management.
The Cultural Landscape and Heritage Paradox
[The Cultural Landscape and Heritage Paradox | Tom Bloemers, Henk Kars, Arnold Van der Valk and Mies Wijnen, eds. | Amsterdam University Press / Cambridge Core | 2021]
Explores the tension between conserving historic landscapes and accommodating environmental, economic, social, and spatial change through integrated heritage planning.
Report Collection Spotlight: Cultural Landscape Reports
[Report Collection Spotlight: Cultural Landscape Reports | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | 2021]
Examines Cultural Landscape Reports as interdisciplinary planning documents that connect historical research, existing conditions, significance assessments, and treatment recommendations.
Changing Landscapes of Archaeology and Heritage
[Changing Landscapes of Archaeology and Heritage | Graham Fairclough and Heleen van Londen | The Cultural Landscape and Heritage Paradox / Cambridge University Press | 2021]
Argues that landscape provides common ground for archaeology, heritage, environmental studies, policy, planning, and public participation rather than belonging to a single discipline.
Setting the Scene: A Guide to Cultural Landscapes
[Setting the Scene: A Guide to Cultural Landscapes | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | 2018]
Provides an accessible overview of cultural landscapes ranging from farms and battlefields to parks, cemeteries, mines, and urban green spaces, emphasizing both tangible and intangible landscape characteristics.
Negotiating the Meaning of Global Heritage: ‘Cultural Landscapes’ in the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, 1972–92
[Negotiating the Meaning of Global Heritage: ‘Cultural Landscapes’ in the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, 1972–92 | Aurélie Elisa Gfeller | Journal of Global History | 2013]
Reconstructs the international negotiations that led UNESCO to recognize cultural landscapes in 1992 and shows how the change challenged older institutional divisions between natural and cultural heritage.
Cultural Landscapes
[Cultural Landscapes | Lesley Head | The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies | 2012]
Reviews the intellectual history of the cultural-landscape concept, including debates over material versus symbolic landscapes and the traditional separation between nature and culture.
Origins of the European Landscape Convention
[Origins of the Convention | Council of Europe | Council of Europe Landscape Convention | n.d.]
Traces the development of European policies treating landscapes as integrated cultural and natural environments requiring protection, management, planning, and public participation.
Cultural Landscapes
[Cultural Landscapes | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Defines cultural landscapes as the combined works of nature and humankind and explains designed, organically evolved, and associative landscapes. It also discusses how traditional land-use practices can sustain biodiversity and cultural identity.
About Cultural Landscapes
[About Cultural Landscapes | The Cultural Landscape Foundation | TCLF | n.d.]
Explains why landscapes shaped by human involvement are important cultural resources and discusses designed, ethnographic, historic, and vernacular landscapes as expressions of identity and history.
Conservation, Planning, Assessment, and Participation
Mapping Historic Garden Continuity in Nanchang Using Deep Mapping and Historic Land-Use Assessment
[Mapping Historic Garden Continuity in Nanchang Using Deep Mapping and Historic Land-Use Assessment | Ying Du et al. | Heritage Science | July 10, 2026]
Combines historical land-use analysis and deep mapping to measure the spatial and temporal continuity of gardens understood as evolving cultural landscapes.
Identifying the Cultural Landscape Character of the Toraja Indigenous Settlement
[Identifying the Cultural Landscape Character of the Toraja Indigenous Settlement Using the Landscape Character Assessment Method: A Case Study of Tongkonan Sa’pang | Ira Prayuni Rante Allo, Firmansyah and Bintang Nidia Kusuma | Built Heritage | June 15, 2026]
Studies a living Toraja landscape in Indonesia where settlement form, kinship, cosmology, agriculture, ancestral relationships, customary ecological management, and sacred meanings are threatened by modernization and tourism.
Cultural Landscape Clustering and Zoning of Traditional Rural Settlements
[Cultural Landscape Clustering and Zoning of Traditional Rural Settlements | Deyi Kong, Xinhui Fei and Ziyi Li | Scientific Reports | June 8, 2026]
Develops methods for identifying and grouping landscape characteristics in traditional rural settlements so that conservation policies can respond to regional differences.
Quantifying Cultural Landscape Structure in Historic Nanjing: A Landscape Ecological Approach
[Quantifying Cultural Landscape Structure in Historic Nanjing: A Landscape Ecological Approach | Junting Rong et al. | npj Heritage Science | April 18, 2026]
Uses GIS and landscape-ecology indicators to measure fragmentation, connectivity, functional diversity, and spatial organization across cultural-landscape patches in historic Nanjing.
Cultural Landscape Planning in Rural Contexts
[Cultural Landscape Planning in Rural Contexts: A Comparative Appraisal of GIS-Based and Other Participatory Methods | Marta Ducci, Gert-Jan Burgers and Ron Janssen | Landscape Online | February 14, 2026]
Compares participatory techniques and finds that simplified GIS and digital mapping can broaden community involvement in identifying heritage values and planning rural cultural landscapes.
An Integrative Hazard-Ecology-Perception Framework for Cultural Landscape Planning
[An Integrative Hazard-Ecology-Perception Framework for Cultural Landscape Planning | Various authors | Ecological Indicators | February 2026]
Combines environmental hazards, ecological sensitivity, expert assessments, and public perceptions to develop differentiated conservation and development strategies for cultural landscapes.
Climate Change References and Reports
[Climate Change References and Reports | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | 2026]
Collects guidance, assessments, strategies, and case studies dealing with climate impacts, adaptation, vulnerability assessment, and stewardship of cultural landscapes.
Beyond Culture/Nature Divides: New Approaches and Tools for a Cultural Integrated Landscape Management
[Beyond Culture/Nature Divides: New Approaches and Tools for a Cultural Integrated Landscape Management | Luiz Oosterbeek | Diversity | June 19, 2025]
Argues for landscape management that abandons rigid divisions between natural and cultural resources and instead considers long-term interactions among societies, ecosystems, heritage, and biodiversity.
Climate Change and Cultural Landscapes
[Climate Change and Cultural Landscapes | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | November 13, 2024]
Explores cultural landscapes as integrated natural-cultural systems vulnerable to flooding, wildfire, drought, sea-level rise, ecological change, and other climate impacts.
Evolution of Cultural Landscape Heritage Layers and Value Assessment in Urban Countryside Historic Districts
[Evolution of Cultural Landscape Heritage Layers and Value Assessment in Urban Countryside Historic Districts: The Case of Jiufeng Sheshan, Shanghai, China | Xufang Li et al. | Heritage Science | March 21, 2024]
Studies changing historical layers in a landscape located between urban and rural environments and proposes methods for evaluating its accumulated heritage values.
Technical Guidance for Assessing Physical and Cultural Heritage
[Technical Guidance for Assessing Physical and Cultural Heritage or any Structure, Site or Thing | Impact Assessment Agency of Canada | Government of Canada | 2024]
Discusses cultural landscapes within environmental and heritage impact assessment and explains designed, organically evolved, and associative landscape categories.
Indigenous Cultural Landscapes: Decolonizing Landscape Within Settler Colonial Societies
[Indigenous Cultural Landscapes: Decolonizing Landscape Within Settler Colonial Societies | Various authors | Annals of the American Association of Geographers | 2024]
Examines Indigenous Cultural Landscape studies in the Chesapeake region and argues that mapping mobility, relationships, temporality, and Indigenous understandings of place can challenge conventional settler concepts of landscape.
Cultural Landscapes in Climate Change: A Framework for Resilience in Developing Countries
[Cultural Landscapes in Climate Change: A Framework for Resilience in Developing Countries | Various authors | Journal of Environmental Management | 2024]
Develops a resilience framework emphasizing management, livelihoods, social conditions, cultural heritage, and community capacity in landscapes threatened by climatic change.
Co-Design Workshops for Cultural Landscape Planning
[Co-Design Workshops for Cultural Landscape Planning | Marta Ducci et al. | Landscape Research | April 26, 2023]
Tests methods bringing citizens, heritage experts, planners, and stakeholders together to identify landscape values and jointly design conservation and development strategies.
Working with Cultural Landscapes: A Guide for the National Capital Region
[Working with Cultural Landscapes: A Guide for the National Capital Region | National Capital Commission | Government of Canada | 2023]
Provides a practical methodology for recognizing cultural landscapes, assessing their heritage values, identifying character-defining elements, and making conservation recommendations.
Management Effectiveness Evaluation of World Cultural Landscape Heritage: A Case from China
[Management Effectiveness Evaluation of World Cultural Landscape Heritage: A Case from China | Jiami Zhou et al. | Heritage Science | February 10, 2022]
Develops an evaluation framework for assessing how effectively World Heritage cultural landscapes are governed, conserved, monitored, and managed.
Cultural Landscapes under the Threat of Climate Change: A Systematic Study of Barriers to Resilience
[Cultural Landscapes under the Threat of Climate Change: A Systematic Study of Barriers to Resilience | Gül Aktürk and Ahmadreza Shirvani Dastgerdi | Sustainability | September 6, 2021]
Reviews hundreds of publications to identify institutional, technical, social, and governance barriers that impede adaptation of cultural landscapes to climate change.
Cultural Landscapes: A Multi-Stakeholder Methodological Approach to Support Widespread and Shared Tourism Development Strategies
[Cultural Landscapes: A Multi-Stakeholder Methodological Approach to Support Widespread and Shared Tourism Development Strategies | Lucia Della Spina and Claudia Giorno | Sustainability | June 25, 2021]
Proposes participatory decision-making methods that treat landscapes as common goods and seek to balance tourism development, heritage conservation, local interests, and resilience.
Cultural Landscapes: Exploring Local People's Understanding of Cultural Practices as “Heritage”
[Cultural Landscapes: Exploring Local People's Understanding of Cultural Practices as “Heritage” | Various authors | Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development | April 30, 2021]
Argues that landscape heritage should not be defined solely by experts and institutions but should incorporate how residents understand everyday traditions, practices, identity, and place.
Cultural Landscape Preservation and Social–Ecological Sustainability
[Cultural Landscape Preservation and Social–Ecological Sustainability | María Fe Schmitz and Cristina Herrero-Jáuregui | Sustainability | March 1, 2021]
Frames cultural landscapes as social-ecological systems in which biodiversity, traditional ecological knowledge, natural resources, cultural practices, and community resilience have co-evolved.
Cultural Forces in the Creation of Landscapes of South-Eastern Rhodope
[Cultural Forces in the Creation of Landscapes of South-Eastern Rhodope: Evolution of the Byzantine Monastic Landscape | Maria Kampa and I. Ispikoudis | Landscape Archaeology between Art and Science | 2021]
Examines the long transformation of a mountainous landscape by Byzantine monastic communities and later populations, illustrating landscapes as historical palimpsests.
Guidelines from the Heritage Field for the Integration of Landscape and Heritage Planning
[Guidelines from the Heritage Field for the Integration of Landscape and Heritage Planning: A Systematic Literature Review | Various authors | Landscape and Urban Planning | 2020]
Reviews heritage scholarship to identify operational principles that can better integrate cultural heritage, landscape planning, collective memory, identity, and sustainable development.
Understanding the Relationship between Component and Attribute of Cultural Landscapes
[Understanding the Relationship between Component and Attribute of Cultural Landscapes: Case of Indian Music and Cultural Landscapes | Balaji Venkatachary and Vishakha Kawathekar | Journal of Heritage Management | August 13, 2018]
Examines how tangible landscape components interact with intangible cultural attributes and uses Indian musical traditions to illustrate value-based cultural-landscape assessment.
Cultural Landscapes: The Future in the Process
[Cultural Landscapes: The Future in the Process | Selena Bagnara Milan | Journal of Heritage Management | December 13, 2017]
Emphasizes the relationship between communities, identity, landscape character, quality of life, and belonging and advocates interdisciplinary approaches to evaluating changing landscapes.
Climate Change and Cultural-Landscape Resilience
Climate Change Risk Reduction in Cultural Landscapes
[Climate Change Risk Reduction in Cultural Landscapes: Insights from Cinque Terre and Waterloo | Various authors | Land Use Policy | December 2022]
Compares climate adaptation approaches and argues that effective cultural-landscape resilience requires community participation integrated with risk assessment and land-use planning.
Climate Change Adaptation Policy and Planning for Cultural Heritage
[Climate Change Adaptation Policy and Planning for Cultural Heritage in Low- and Middle-Income Countries | Cathy Daly et al. | Antiquity | 2022]
Examines climate threats to archaeological sites and cultural landscapes and emphasizes the need for adaptation strategies tailored to countries with limited heritage-management resources.
Mapping Past and Future Land-Use Change in Europe's Cultural Landscapes
[Mapping and Modelling Past and Future Land Use Change in Europe's Cultural Landscapes | Various authors | Land Use Policy | January 2019]
Models how urbanization, agricultural intensification, and land abandonment could transform culturally important European landscapes under alternative future scenarios.
Indigenous, Sacred, and Community Landscapes
Cultural Landscapes: Discourse since UNESCO 1992
[Cultural Landscapes: Discourse since UNESCO 1992 | Edwin Oluoch K'Oyoo | Journal of the Kenya National Commission for UNESCO | February 2026]
Reviews cultural-landscape scholarship since UNESCO formally adopted the concept and highlights the relatively limited representation of African and Global South landscapes in research.
Murujuga Cultural Landscape
[Murujuga Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | 2025]
Recognizes an Aboriginal cultural landscape in Western Australia containing an extraordinary concentration of rock art and continuing relationships among Traditional Owners, land, sea, plants, animals, and ancestral traditions.
Mount Mulanje Cultural Landscape
[Mount Mulanje Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | 2025]
Examines a Malawian mountain landscape where natural features, sacred beliefs, community traditions, stories, livelihoods, and long-standing cultural relationships with the mountain remain closely connected.
Indigenous Cultural Landscapes
[Indigenous Cultural Landscapes | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | 2024]
Explains an approach to understanding landscapes from Indigenous perspectives, emphasizing territories, natural resources, settlements, subsistence, spiritual relationships, and continuing land-management traditions.
Cultural Landscape of Kenozero Lake
[Cultural Landscape of Kenozero Lake | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | 2024]
Describes a northern Russian lake-and-forest landscape containing traditional villages, wooden churches, chapels, fields, sacred groves, cemeteries, and centuries-old rural land-management traditions.
Cultural Landscapes of Canyon de Chelly through Time: Heritage in the Present
[Cultural Landscapes of Canyon de Chelly through Time: Heritage in the Present | Jessica Joyce Christie | Earth Politics and Intangible Heritage | 2021]
Examines Canyon de Chelly as a Navajo cultural landscape shaped by ancestral places, rock art, oral narratives, ceremonies, land ownership, and continuing cultural relationships.
“That Chuitt River Is Ours”: Traditional Cultural Landscapes and the National Historic Preservation Act
[“That Chuitt River Is Ours”: Traditional Cultural Landscapes and the National Historic Preservation Act | Wesley James Furlong | US/ICOMOS Symposium Proceedings | 2019]
Explores the challenges of recognizing Indigenous traditional cultural landscapes within U.S. historic-preservation law and argues for stronger consideration of intangible relationships with place.
Cultural Landscapes and Protected Areas: Unfolding the Linkages and Synergies
[Cultural Landscapes and Protected Areas: Unfolding the Linkages and Synergies | Gunnar Finke | IUCN | March 19, 2014]
Explores connections between World Heritage cultural landscapes and protected areas and argues that integrating cultural and natural values can improve conservation.
ǂKhomani Cultural Landscape
[ǂKhomani Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Presents a Kalahari landscape where Indigenous San communities maintain knowledge of plants, wildlife, water, movement, storytelling, hunting traditions, and relationships with desert ecosystems.
Writing-on-Stone / Áísínai’pi
[Writing-on-Stone / Áísínai’pi | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines the sacred Milk River landscape of the Blackfoot Confederacy, where thousands of rock images and distinctive geological formations embody continuing spiritual relationships with place.
Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park
[Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Presents an internationally important associative cultural landscape in which geological formations, Indigenous law, sacred narratives, ecological knowledge, and continuing Anangu cultural practices are inseparable.
Tongariro National Park
[Tongariro National Park | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Recognizes volcanic mountains whose spiritual and cultural significance to Māori communities helped establish international recognition of associative cultural landscapes.
Taputapuātea
[Taputapuātea | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Presents a Polynesian cultural landscape and seascape centered on a major ceremonial complex whose marae, lagoon, ocean routes, and sacred traditions connect communities across eastern Polynesia.
Sulaiman-Too Sacred Mountain
[Sulaiman-Too Sacred Mountain | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Explores a sacred mountain overlooking Kyrgyzstan's Fergana Valley whose caves, petroglyphs, mosques, pilgrimage paths, and worship sites combine pre-Islamic and Islamic traditions.
Sukur Cultural Landscape
[Sukur Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Describes a Nigerian highland landscape containing terraced fields, settlements, sacred places, iron-working remains, paved pathways, and the palace of the Hidi chief.
St Kilda
[St Kilda | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines a remote Scottish island landscape shaped by seabird harvesting, grazing, settlement, distinctive stone structures, extreme isolation, and long-term adaptation to Atlantic conditions.
Saloum Delta
[Saloum Delta | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines a Senegalese delta containing shell mounds, burial sites, fisheries, mangroves, waterways, settlements, and evidence of long-term human dependence on estuarine resources.
Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range
[Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Connects mountains, forests, shrines, temples, and pilgrimage trails reflecting centuries of interaction between Shinto traditions, Buddhism, religious practice, and the natural environment.
Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests
[Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Protects fortified forest settlements and sacred groves on Kenya's coast whose ecological survival is closely tied to Mijikenda identity, spiritual traditions, customary institutions, and ancestral history.
Royal Hill of Ambohimanga
[Royal Hill of Ambohimanga | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Describes a sacred Malagasy royal landscape combining fortified settlements, forests, burial grounds, ritual sites, architecture, political history, and continuing spiritual significance.
Pimachiowin Aki
[Pimachiowin Aki | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Describes an immense Anishinaabe cultural landscape in Canada where waterways, forests, wildlife, sacred places, subsistence activities, and Indigenous stewardship remain interconnected.
Petroglyphs of the Archaeological Landscape of Tanbaly
[Petroglyphs of the Archaeological Landscape of Tanbaly | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Protects a Central Asian landscape containing thousands of rock engravings, settlements, burial sites, and ceremonial places that document long-term relationships among pastoral peoples and their environment.
Paraty and Ilha Grande — Culture and Biodiversity
[Paraty and Ilha Grande – Culture and Biodiversity | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Integrates Atlantic Forest biodiversity with Indigenous, Quilombola, Caiçara, colonial, agricultural, and maritime cultural traditions in southeastern Brazil.
Papahānaumokuākea
[Papahānaumokuākea | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Presents the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands as a mixed natural-cultural seascape with profound Native Hawaiian genealogical, cosmological, spiritual, navigational, and ecological significance.
Land of Olives and Vines — Battir
[Palestine: Land of Olives and Vines – Cultural Landscape of Southern Jerusalem, Battir | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents terraced agriculture, olive groves, vineyards, springs, irrigation channels, and customary water-sharing practices in a Palestinian landscape cultivated over many generations.
Ouadi Qadisha and the Forest of the Cedars of God
[Ouadi Qadisha (the Holy Valley) and the Forest of the Cedars of God | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Explores a Lebanese mountain valley shaped by centuries of Christian monasticism, caves, monasteries, pilgrimage, agriculture, and cultural associations with ancient cedar forests.
Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove
[Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Describes a surviving Yoruba sacred forest in Nigeria where the Osun River, shrines, sculptures, religious practices, biodiversity, and traditional belief remain closely interconnected.
Mount Wutai
[Mount Wutai | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines a sacred Buddhist mountain landscape in China where temples, religious traditions, architecture, pilgrimage, forests, and mountain geography have interacted for centuries.
Matobo Hills
[Matobo Hills | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines Zimbabwe's granite hills as an archaeological and sacred cultural landscape containing rock art, ancient shelters, shrines, ritual places, and continuing community traditions.
Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape
[Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents the remains of an important southern African kingdom whose settlements, agricultural lands, trade networks, political centers, and riverine environment reveal changing social organization.
Lushan National Park
[Lushan National Park | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Presents a mountain landscape shaped by Buddhist and Taoist temples, Confucian scholarship, villas, literature, painting, and long-standing associations between natural scenery and Chinese intellectual culture.
Le Morne Cultural Landscape
[Le Morne Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Interprets a dramatic mountain in Mauritius as a landscape of memory associated with escaped enslaved people, resistance to slavery, refuge, and the history of the African diaspora.
Koutammakou, the Land of the Batammariba
[Koutammakou, the Land of the Batammariba | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines a living cultural landscape in Togo and Benin combining tower-houses, farms, sacred forests, ritual sites, terraces, springs, beliefs, and community traditions.
Gobustan Rock Art Cultural Landscape
[Gobustan Rock Art Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Preserves thousands of prehistoric engravings, caves, settlements, and burial sites illustrating changing human lifeways and environments around the Caspian region over many millennia.
Chief Roi Mata's Domain
[Chief Roi Mata's Domain | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Explores a Vanuatu cultural landscape associated with Chief Roi Mata through settlements, burial places, oral traditions, ceremonial sites, islands, and continuing community memory.
Budj Bim Cultural Landscape
[Budj Bim Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents the Gunditjmara people's sophisticated aquaculture landscape in southeastern Australia, including channels, dams, and wetlands developed to harvest and manage short-finned eels.
Bassari Country
[Bassari Country: Bassari, Fula and Bedik Cultural Landscapes | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Presents three Senegalese cultural landscapes shaped by agro-pastoral traditions, rice cultivation, villages, ritual practices, architecture, and long-term adaptation to environmental constraints.
Aasivissuit–Nipisat: Inuit Hunting Ground between Ice and Sea
[Aasivissuit–Nipisat: Inuit Hunting Ground between Ice and Sea | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Represents thousands of years of Inuit movement between coastal and inland hunting grounds and demonstrates cultural adaptation to Arctic ecosystems and seasonal resources.
Agricultural, Pastoral, Vineyard, and Living Heritage Landscapes
Philippine Heritage Bridging Cultural Ecosystem Service and Nature’s Contribution to People in Cultural Landscapes
[Philippine Heritage Bridging Cultural Ecosystem Service and Nature’s Contribution to People in Cultural Landscapes | Various authors | Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development | June 12, 2026]
Reviews Philippine research connecting cultural ecosystem services, heritage, biodiversity, human well-being, and nature’s contributions to people within cultural landscapes.
Agro-Cultural-Tourism Integration as a Pathway to Common Prosperity
[Agro-Cultural-Tourism Integration as a Pathway to Common Prosperity in Agricultural Cultural Heritage Areas | Yue Zhang, Guogang Wang and Yanwei Shen | Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems | February 17, 2026]
Investigates how agricultural heritage, tourism, local livelihoods, and cultural resources can be integrated while reducing tensions between economic development and landscape preservation.
Governing Sustainable Tourism in Al-Ahsa Oasis
[Governing Sustainable Tourism in Al-Ahsa Oasis: An Adaptive Framework for a Living Cultural Landscape | Various authors | Sustainability | 2026]
Proposes governance approaches that integrate palm agriculture, water management, rural livelihoods, climate stress, visitor management, investment, and heritage conservation in a living oasis landscape.
The Cultural Landscape Heritage Sustainable Strategy: Integration of Agriculture and Tourism in Bali
[The Cultural Landscape Heritage Sustainable Strategy: Integration of Agriculture and Tourism in Bali | Various authors | Discover Sustainability | 2025]
Develops strategies for balancing tourism, agriculture, community participation, environmental integrity, and local Tri Hita Karana traditions within Bali's Subak cultural landscape.
Sustainable Water Management and Agricultural, Forestry, and Livestock System of the Okuizumo Area
[Sustainable Water Management and Agricultural, Forestry, and Livestock System of the Okuizumo Area, Japan | FAO | Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems | 2025]
Examines a satoyama landscape where former iron-mining terrain was transformed into rice terraces, irrigation networks, forests, pastures, and diversified agricultural systems.
Gaolan Shichuan Ancient Pear Orchard System
[Gaolan Shichuan Ancient Pear Orchard System in Gansu Province, China | FAO | Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems | 2025]
Describes centuries-old orchards where agricultural biodiversity, ancestral rituals, historic pear varieties, community organizations, and traditional farming collectively form a distinctive cultural landscape.
The Resilience of Cultural Landscapes
[The Resilience of Cultural Landscapes: Perspectives from UNESCO World Heritage Sites | Fabrizio Aimar | Springer | 2024]
Examines resilience, governance, productive landscapes, identity, community involvement, management planning, and adaptation through comparative studies of UNESCO cultural landscapes.
The Interactive Process of Cultural Landscape
[The Interactive Process of Cultural Landscape: Taking the Trails Around Zhengqi Pavilion as an Example | Various authors | Frontiers of Architectural Research | 2023]
Treats cultural landscapes as dynamic networks created through repeated human movement, perception, behavior, social interaction, and modification of physical environments.
Cultural Landscape Visualization at Statue of Liberty National Monument
[Cultural Landscape Visualization: The Use of Non-Photorealistic 3D Rendering as an Analytical Tool to Convey Change at Statue of Liberty National Monument | Aidan Ackerman et al. | Journal of Cultural Heritage | 2023]
Demonstrates how three-dimensional digital models can visualize landscape change, communicate uncertainty, support historical research, and improve interpretation of complex heritage landscapes.
Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Agriculture Conservation
[A Study of Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Agriculture Conservation as a Means to Develop Rural Farms as Agritourism Destinations | Rungnapha Khamung | Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Studies | 2015]
Examines how traditional farming, agricultural landscapes, local knowledge, conservation, cultural heritage, and agritourism can reinforce sustainable rural economies.
Viñales Valley
[Viñales Valley | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Shows how traditional tobacco farming, vernacular settlements, agricultural practices, and dramatic limestone formations have combined to produce a distinctive Cuban rural landscape.
Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero and Monferrato
[Vineyard Landscape of Piedmont: Langhe-Roero and Monferrato | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Illustrates centuries of interaction between viticulture, settlements, wine production, land tenure, cultivated hillsides, and regional identity in northern Italy.
Vegaøyan — The Vega Archipelago
[Vegaøyan – The Vega Archipelago | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Describes an Arctic coastal cultural landscape where fishing, farming, settlement, navigation, and the traditional harvesting of eiderdown supported communities for many centuries.
Val d'Orcia
[Val d'Orcia | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines the carefully managed agricultural landscape of Tuscany whose farms, fields, settlements, roads, and visual composition influenced Renaissance ideas about harmonious rural landscapes.
Traditional Gudeuljang Irrigated Rice Terraces in Cheongsando
[Traditional Gudeuljang Irrigated Rice Terraces in Cheongsando, Republic of Korea | FAO | Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems | n.d.]
Describes an island landscape shaped by stone-walled rice terraces, traditional irrigation systems, coastal settlements, local building materials, and cooperative water management.
Tokaj Wine Region Historic Cultural Landscape
[Tokaj Wine Region Historic Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Represents a historic Hungarian wine landscape combining vineyards, settlements, cellars, volcanic terrain, traditional production systems, and long-standing regional commercial networks.
The Persian Garden
[The Persian Garden | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines Persian garden design as a cultural-landscape tradition combining water engineering, geometric organization, architecture, vegetation, shade, symbolism, and representations of paradise.
The English Lake District
[The English Lake District | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Explores a pastoral landscape shaped by farming, stone walls, villages, lakes, woodlands, Romantic literature, tourism, and evolving ideas about landscape beauty and conservation.
The Climats, Terroirs of Burgundy
[The Climats, Terroirs of Burgundy | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents the fine-grained division of Burgundy's vineyards into historically recognized climats, demonstrating centuries of interaction among geology, viticulture, property, knowledge, and wine culture.
The Causses and the Cévennes, Mediterranean Agro-Pastoral Cultural Landscape
[The Causses and the Cévennes, Mediterranean Agro-Pastoral Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Preserves extensive evidence of Mediterranean pastoralism, transhumance, livestock grazing, farm buildings, paths, and land-management systems shaped by centuries of human adaptation.
Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras
[Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Presents Ifugao mountain terraces as a living agricultural landscape sustained through irrigation, communal labor, traditional ecological knowledge, ritual practices, forests, and rice cultivation.
Pyrénées–Mont Perdu
[Pyrénées–Mont Perdu | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Combines spectacular mountain ecosystems with villages, pastures, transhumance routes, and pastoral practices shared historically by communities on both sides of the French-Spanish border.
Lavaux, Vineyard Terraces
[Lavaux, Vineyard Terraces | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines nearly a millennium of vineyard cultivation along Lake Geneva where terraces, villages, roads, wineries, and community stewardship created a highly distinctive productive landscape.
Landscape of the Pico Island Vineyard Culture
[Landscape of the Pico Island Vineyard Culture | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Describes vineyards on volcanic Pico Island protected by extensive networks of basalt walls designed to shelter vines from Atlantic winds and salt spray.
Kujataa Greenland: Norse and Inuit Farming at the Edge of the Ice Cap
[Kujataa Greenland: Norse and Inuit Farming at the Edge of the Ice Cap | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Illustrates successive Norse and Inuit farming traditions in southern Greenland and their adaptation to marginal agricultural conditions near the Greenland ice sheet.
Konso Cultural Landscape
[Konso Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Describes terraced hillsides, fortified settlements, stone walls, water systems, sacred traditions, and communal institutions developed by the Konso people in a challenging Ethiopian environment.
Jurisdiction of Saint-Emilion
[Jurisdiction of Saint-Emilion | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Illustrates more than a millennium of viticulture through vineyards, villages, historic buildings, land organization, and economic traditions centered on wine production.
Hortobágy National Park — the Puszta
[Hortobágy National Park — the Puszta | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Represents the Hungarian Great Plain as a continuing pastoral landscape shaped by extensive grazing, herding traditions, wetlands, grasslands, routes, and traditional livestock management.
Cultural Landscape of Maymand
[Cultural Landscape of Maymand | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Represents a semi-arid Iranian landscape shaped by seasonal pastoral migration and distinctive dwellings used at different times of year in response to environmental conditions.
Cultural Landscape of Honghe Hani Rice Terraces
[Cultural Landscape of Honghe Hani Rice Terraces | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Describes an integrated Hani system of forests, villages, irrigation channels, livestock, aquatic species, ritual traditions, and thousands of mountain rice terraces developed over roughly 1,300 years.
Cultural Landscape of Hawraman/Uramanat
[Cultural Landscape of Hawraman/Uramanat | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents Kurdish mountain settlements, terraced agriculture, seasonal migration, architecture, social structures, and traditional land-use practices adapted to rugged terrain.
Cultural Landscape of Bali Province: The Subak System
[Cultural Landscape of Bali Province: The Subak System as a Manifestation of the Tri Hita Karana Philosophy | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines Bali's cooperative subak irrigation networks, water temples, rice terraces, watershed management, and philosophy linking spiritual, human, and natural worlds.
Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia
[Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents mountain settlements, small farms, coffee cultivation, architecture, social institutions, and farming traditions that collectively created Colombia's distinctive coffee landscape.
Champagne Hillsides, Houses and Cellars
[Champagne Hillsides, Houses and Cellars | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Connects vineyards, production sites, underground cellars, commercial houses, and settlements associated with the historical development of sparkling-wine production in Champagne.
Ancient Villages of Northern Syria
[Ancient Villages of Northern Syria | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents dozens of abandoned villages whose houses, churches, temples, cisterns, agricultural plots, and water systems preserve an extensive relict rural landscape of Late Antiquity.
Alto Douro Wine Region
[Alto Douro Wine Region | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines a Portuguese landscape transformed over roughly two thousand years by vineyards, terraces, villages, estates, roads, and the production and international trade of wine.
Al-Ahsa Oasis
[Al-Ahsa Oasis, an Evolving Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Describes a vast Arabian oasis containing millions of date palms, canals, springs, wells, settlements, archaeological sites, and water-management systems reflecting continuous occupation.
Agricultural Landscape of Southern Öland
[Agricultural Landscape of Southern Öland | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Explores a Swedish island landscape where farming, grazing, settlements, stone walls, and adaptation to limestone soils preserve evidence of approximately five thousand years of human occupation.
Agave Landscape and Ancient Industrial Facilities of Tequila
[Agave Landscape and Ancient Industrial Facilities of Tequila | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Combines blue-agave fields, distilleries, settlements, archaeological remains, and production traditions associated with tequila and long-term cultivation of agave in Mexico.
Biodiversity and Natural Resource Integration
Traditional Cultural Landscapes Revisited
[Traditional Cultural Landscapes Revisited: Classification, Diversity, Services, and Their Restoration | Stefan Zerbe | DIE ERDE | January 21, 2025]
Reviews traditional landscapes as multifunctional social-ecological systems and argues that their low-intensity agriculture, biodiversity, ecological knowledge, and landscape services provide models for sustainable land use.
Cultural Landscapes: Places That We Look at Every Day, But Often Don't Really See
[Cultural Landscapes: Places That We Look at Every Day, But Often Don't Really See | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | 2025]
Explains how topography, vegetation, structures, circulation, views, land use, and other everyday features can reveal historical relationships between people and places.
Buckner Orchard History and Care
[Buckner Orchard History and Care | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | 2025]
Examines a historic Washington apple orchard as a living agricultural landscape maintained through preservation planning, community harvest traditions, historic cultivars, and continuing orchard management.
The Orchards at Manzanar
[The Orchards at Manzanar: Continuity, Care, and Community | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | July 17, 2024]
Traces orchard history before, during, and after the incarceration of Japanese Americans at Manzanar and explains how surviving trees function as living historical resources.
Cultural Landscape Genes of Traditional Settlements in China
[A Parameter to Featuring the Cultural Landscape Genes of Traditional Settlements in China: A Perspective of Geographical Information | Zui Hu and Min Tan | Heritage Science | May 6, 2024]
Develops GIS-based methods for identifying recurring cultural-landscape characteristics in traditional settlements and translating cultural features into spatial data.
The Cultural Landscape of the Kiska Battlefield
[The Cultural Landscape of the Kiska Battlefield | Dirk H.R. Spennemann, Janet Clemens and Janis Kozlowski | National Park Service | 2024]
Examines how intensive World War II military occupation left roads, installations, wreckage, earthworks, structures, and other remains across an otherwise sparsely inhabited Aleutian landscape.
Historic Orchards and Fruit Trees in National Parks
[Historic Orchards and Fruit Trees in National Parks | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | 2023]
Surveys orchards as living evidence of agricultural, ornamental, commemorative, subsistence, and community landscapes throughout the U.S. National Park System.
Defining Orchards
[Defining Orchards | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | 2022]
Explains how historic orchards and individual fruit trees can be evaluated as cultural-landscape resources using land use, vegetation, circulation, spatial organization, structures, and other landscape characteristics.
Cultural Landscapes and Natural Resource Collaboration
[Cultural Landscapes & Natural Resource Collaboration | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | 2021]
Explains how cultural-landscape documentation can integrate ecological monitoring, vegetation, hydrology, soils, wildlife, historical land use, and cultural values rather than managing nature and culture separately.
John Muir National Historic Site Cultural Landscape
[John Muir National Historic Site Cultural Landscape | National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | January 6, 2020]
Documents the Strentzel-Muir ranch landscape, including orchards, vineyards, buildings, agricultural land, gardens, soils, and its connections with John Muir's life and environmental thought.
Characterizing Social-Ecological Units to Inform Biodiversity Conservation
[Characterizing Social–Ecological Units to Inform Biodiversity Conservation in Cultural Landscapes | Various authors | Diversity and Distributions | 2016]
Uses villages in southern Transylvania to show how different farming and land-use patterns correspond with distinct levels of plant, bird, and butterfly diversity.
Socioecological Drivers Facilitating Biodiversity Conservation
[Socioecological Drivers Facilitating Biodiversity Conservation in Traditional Farming Landscapes | Various authors | Ecosystem Health and Sustainability | November 20, 2015]
Finds that traditional farming practices, habitat mosaics, wood pastures, landscape heterogeneity, cultural values, and human-nature relationships can support high biodiversity in Transylvania.
Biodiversity, Traditional Management Systems, and Cultural Landscapes
[Biodiversity, Traditional Management Systems, and Cultural Landscapes: Examples from the Boreal Forest of Canada | Fikret Berkes and Iain J. Davidson-Hunt | International Social Science Journal | 2006]
Examines Indigenous Anishinaabe landscape-management practices, including fire and succession management, and their implications for maintaining ecological diversity in boreal forests.
Designed, Urban, Garden, and River Landscapes
West Lake Cultural Landscape of Hangzhou
[West Lake Cultural Landscape of Hangzhou | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Demonstrates how natural scenery was deliberately modified through islands, causeways, temples, gardens, and viewpoints, creating a landscape that profoundly influenced Chinese garden design.
Wachau Cultural Landscape
[Wachau Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents a Danube landscape shaped by vineyards, orchards, villages, monasteries, castles, river transport, settlement patterns, and long-term cultivation.
Upper Middle Rhine Valley
[Upper Middle Rhine Valley | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Presents a river corridor densely layered with vineyards, castles, historic towns, transportation routes, folklore, and artistic associations that developed around the Rhine.
The Par Force Hunting Landscape in North Zealand
[The Par Force Hunting Landscape in North Zealand | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Presents a deliberately ordered Danish hunting landscape whose road systems, forests, lodges, intersections, and geometry expressed royal power and Baroque landscape planning.
The Loire Valley between Sully-sur-Loire and Chalonnes
[The Loire Valley between Sully-sur-Loire and Chalonnes | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines a major river cultural landscape shaped by settlements, agriculture, castles, gardens, transportation, flood management, and centuries of interaction with the Loire.
Sítio Roberto Burle Marx
[Sítio Roberto Burle Marx | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Explores the Brazilian landscape architect's experimental garden where native tropical plants, modernist design, ecological observation, art, architecture, and horticulture were combined.
Singapore Botanic Gardens
[Singapore Botanic Gardens | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents a tropical botanical landscape important to plant science, rubber cultivation, conservation, horticulture, recreation, and the historical development of Singapore.
Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte in Braga
[Sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte in Braga | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines a Portuguese sacred landscape formed by monumental stairways, chapels, fountains, gardens, woodland, pilgrimage routes, architecture, and symbolic representations of Christian devotion.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
[Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines a historic scientific and designed landscape whose gardens, collections, glasshouses, architecture, botanical research, and plant exchanges reflect the development of modern botany.
Rio de Janeiro: Carioca Landscapes between the Mountain and the Sea
[Rio de Janeiro: Carioca Landscapes between the Mountain and the Sea | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines the interaction of mountains, forests, coastline, gardens, parks, monuments, urban development, and designed viewpoints in shaping Rio's distinctive identity.
Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro
[Paseo del Prado and Buen Retiro, a Landscape of Arts and Sciences | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines Madrid's historic urban landscape of boulevards, gardens, fountains, museums, scientific institutions, monuments, and public spaces associated with Enlightenment ideals.
Pampulha Modern Ensemble
[Pampulha Modern Ensemble | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Presents a Brazilian modernist landscape where architecture, artificial lake, gardens, sculpture, painting, recreation, and tropical environmental conditions were deliberately integrated.
Muskauer Park / Park Mużakowski
[Muskauer Park / Park Mużakowski | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines a German-Polish designed landscape that integrated gardens, agricultural land, urban spaces, vegetation, architecture, and the natural river valley into a unified composition.
Lednice-Valtice Cultural Landscape
[Lednice-Valtice Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Represents a vast intentionally designed European landscape combining palaces, gardens, forests, waterways, agricultural land, monuments, and picturesque architectural features.
Landscape of Grand Pré
[Landscape of Grand Pré | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents an agricultural landscape created through Acadian dike construction and wetland reclamation and preserves important associations with Acadian settlement and displacement.
Landscape for Breeding and Training of Ceremonial Carriage Horses
[Landscape for Breeding and Training of Ceremonial Carriage Horses at Kladruby nad Labem | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Describes a Czech landscape deliberately organized with pastures, avenues, canals, forests, buildings, villages, and training routes to support ceremonial carriage-horse breeding.
Kalwaria Zebrzydowska
[Kalwaria Zebrzydowska: the Mannerist Architectural and Park Landscape Complex and Pilgrimage Park | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents a Polish pilgrimage landscape where chapels and paths were carefully positioned within hills, forests, and valleys to symbolically recreate biblical geography.
Hallstatt-Dachstein / Salzkammergut Cultural Landscape
[Hallstatt-Dachstein / Salzkammergut Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Shows how salt mining, settlements, transport, mountain geography, and long-term human occupation created one of Europe's most historically significant alpine cultural landscapes.
Garden Kingdom of Dessau-Wörlitz
[Garden Kingdom of Dessau-Wörlitz | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Presents an Enlightenment-era designed landscape integrating gardens, architecture, agriculture, education, water systems, and aesthetic concepts across a large managed territory.
Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe
[Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Highlights monumental Baroque and Romantic landscape design centered on dramatic waterworks, gardens, woodland, architecture, and carefully orchestrated views.
Archaeological, Industrial, and Historic Working Landscapes
Diy-Gid-Biy Cultural Landscape of the Mandara Mountains
[Diy-Gid-Biy Cultural Landscape of the Mandara Mountains | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | 2025]
Presents a Cameroonian mountain landscape containing archaeological remains, settlements, cultivated terrain, sacred associations, and evidence of long-term adaptation by local communities.
Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape
[Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines monumental rock paintings along river cliffs in southern China in relation to settlement, ritual practices, surrounding karst landscapes, and the history of the Luoyue people.
Vat Phou and Associated Ancient Settlements within the Champasak Cultural Landscape
[Vat Phou and Associated Ancient Settlements within the Champasak Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Presents a planned Khmer cultural landscape where mountains, water, temples, settlements, roads, and cosmological ideas were deliberately organized into a symbolic territorial system.
Trang An Landscape Complex
[Trang An Landscape Complex | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Presents a Vietnamese karst landscape containing caves, archaeological sites, waterways, temples, settlements, forests, and evidence of human adaptation to major environmental change.
The Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales
[The Slate Landscape of Northwest Wales | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents quarries, mines, transport systems, settlements, mountains, ports, and communities transformed by the global expansion of Welsh slate production.
Røros Mining Town and the Circumference
[Røros Mining Town and the Circumference | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Shows how copper extraction, agriculture, transportation, settlements, forests, and harsh mountain environmental conditions formed an interconnected industrial cultural landscape in Norway.
Roșia Montană Mining Landscape
[Roșia Montană Mining Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents an exceptionally long Romanian mining tradition through Roman galleries, later mines, settlements, processing areas, water systems, and landscapes transformed by gold extraction.
Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka
[Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents sandstone shelters and extensive rock paintings representing thousands of years of cultural activity and continuing connections with traditions in neighboring Indian communities.
Risco Caido and the Sacred Mountains of Gran Canaria
[Risco Caido and the Sacred Mountains of Gran Canaria Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Describes caves, settlements, granaries, agricultural terraces, sacred mountains, and astronomical and ritual sites associated with the pre-Hispanic culture of Gran Canaria.
Richtersveld Cultural and Botanical Landscape
[Richtersveld Cultural and Botanical Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Represents the continuing seasonal pastoral landscape of the Nama people in South Africa, where livestock movement, portable dwellings, traditional knowledge, biodiversity, and communal land use remain interconnected.
Quebrada de Humahuaca
[Quebrada de Humahuaca | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents a major Andean transportation corridor containing archaeological sites, agricultural landscapes, settlements, trade routes, and evidence of cultural interaction extending over thousands of years.
Prehistoric Caves of Yagul and Mitla
[Prehistoric Caves of Yagul and Mitla in the Central Valley of Oaxaca | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Links archaeological caves, rock shelters, plant remains, early agriculture, and surrounding Mexican landscapes to the transition from foraging to settled food production.
Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape
[Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Preserves archaeological remains, monasteries, pastoral landscapes, settlements, and routes associated with successive nomadic empires and continuing Mongolian pastoral traditions.
Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin
[Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Treats an extensive former coal-mining region as a cultural landscape composed of mines, slag heaps, worker settlements, transport infrastructure, social institutions, and transformed terrain.
Kuk Early Agricultural Site
[Kuk Early Agricultural Site | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents thousands of years of wetland agriculture in Papua New Guinea through drainage channels, cultivation mounds, archaeological soils, and evidence for independent agricultural development.
Krzemionki Prehistoric Striped Flint Mining Region
[Krzemionki Prehistoric Striped Flint Mining Region | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Preserves thousands of prehistoric mining shafts, underground workings, workshops, settlement evidence, and a landscape organized around extracting and processing striped flint.
Kernavė Archaeological Site
[Kernavė Archaeological Site (Cultural Reserve of Kernavė) | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents roughly ten millennia of human settlement in Lithuania through hill forts, burial grounds, settlements, archaeological layers, land-use traces, and the Neris River valley.
Iwami Ginzan Silver Mine and its Cultural Landscape
[Iwami Ginzan Silver Mine and its Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Connects mine shafts, settlements, roads, ports, forests, production areas, and transportation networks associated with a major Japanese silver-producing region.
Incense Route — Desert Cities in the Negev
[Incense Route — Desert Cities in the Negev | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Preserves desert settlements, fortresses, caravan routes, agricultural systems, and water-management features connected with long-distance trade across an arid landscape.
Fray Bentos Industrial Landscape
[Fray Bentos Industrial Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Presents a Uruguayan industrial landscape organized around meat processing, refrigeration, river transport, factories, worker housing, and international food-production networks.
Erzgebirge/Krušnohoří Mining Region
[Erzgebirge/Krušnohoří Mining Region | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Explores a transboundary mining landscape where centuries of silver, tin, cobalt, and uranium extraction shaped settlements, water systems, forests, transportation, technology, and society.
Ennedi Massif: Natural and Cultural Landscape
[Ennedi Massif: Natural and Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Combines dramatic sandstone formations, permanent water sources, Saharan ecosystems, archaeological remains, and thousands of rock paintings and engravings recording long-term human occupation.
Ecosystem and Relict Cultural Landscape of Lopé-Okanda
[Ecosystem and Relict Cultural Landscape of Lopé-Okanda | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Combines Gabonese rainforest and savannah ecology with archaeological settlements, iron-working remains, migration routes, and approximately 1,800 known petroglyphs.
Dutch Water Defence Lines
[Dutch Water Defence Lines | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Explores a 200-kilometre defensive landscape where forts, canals, dikes, sluices, pumping stations, and deliberately flooded polders transformed hydraulic engineering into military strategy.
Diyarbakır Fortress and Hevsel Gardens
[Diyarbakır Fortress and Hevsel Gardens Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Connects monumental city walls with fertile gardens, the Tigris River, bridges, water resources, and agricultural systems that sustained Diyarbakır through numerous historical periods.
Curonian Spit
[Curonian Spit | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines a fragile Baltic dune landscape transformed by fishing villages, forest planting, dune stabilization, navigation, settlement, and centuries of efforts to manage shifting sands.
Cultural Landscape and Archaeological Remains of the Bamiyan Valley
[Cultural Landscape and Archaeological Remains of the Bamiyan Valley | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Integrates Buddhist caves, monasteries, Islamic fortifications, Silk Road history, traditional land use, and the landscape setting of the destroyed monumental Bamiyan Buddhas.
Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape
[Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines an extensive British landscape shaped by copper and tin mining, engine houses, ports, canals, railways, settlements, and technologies later exported around the world.
Blaenavon Industrial Landscape
[Blaenavon Industrial Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Shows how coal and iron production transformed a Welsh valley through mines, quarries, furnaces, transportation systems, worker settlements, and industrial infrastructure.
Bam and its Cultural Landscape
[Bam and its Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines a desert oasis settlement whose survival depended on qanat irrigation, agriculture, fortified architecture, trade routes, and long-term human adaptation to an arid environment.
Archaeological Landscape of the First Coffee Plantations in the South-East of Cuba
[Archaeological Landscape of the First Coffee Plantations in the South-East of Cuba | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Preserves remains of early coffee estates whose buildings, roads, irrigation systems, processing facilities, and altered terrain reveal the history of plantation agriculture and forced labor.
Ancient City of Tauric Chersonese and its Chora
[Ancient City of Tauric Chersonese and its Chora | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines the relationship between an ancient Black Sea city and its surrounding agricultural territory, including vineyards, field systems, roads, farm plots, and archaeological remains.
European Cultural Landscapes
Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy
[Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Describes nine sacred mountain complexes where chapels, sculpture, forests, lakes, pilgrimage routes, and carefully chosen viewpoints created distinctive religious landscapes.
Portovenere, Cinque Terre, and the Islands
[Portovenere, Cinque Terre, and the Islands (Palmaria, Tino and Tinetto) | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Explores a Ligurian coastal landscape where stone terraces, vineyards, olive groves, villages, footpaths, and maritime connections demonstrate a millennium of human occupation.
Medici Villas and Gardens in Tuscany
[Medici Villas and Gardens in Tuscany | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines Renaissance villas and gardens that integrated architecture, agriculture, ornamental planting, landscape design, scholarship, and aristocratic life with the Tuscan countryside.
Madriu-Perafita-Claror Valley
[Madriu-Perafita-Claror Valley | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Documents an Andorran mountain landscape shaped by pastoralism, forestry, agriculture, iron production, settlements, and pathways illustrating centuries of human adaptation to the Pyrenees.
Prosecco Hills of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene
[Le Colline del Prosecco di Conegliano e Valdobbiadene | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Presents an Italian wine landscape shaped by steep vineyards, small agricultural plots, woodland, villages, traditional cultivation techniques, and generations of specialized viticulture.
Fertö / Neusiedlersee Cultural Landscape
[Fertö / Neusiedlersee Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Describes a transboundary Austrian-Hungarian lake landscape shaped by agriculture, livestock raising, vineyards, reed harvesting, villages, wetlands, and thousands of years of cultural interaction.
Cultural Landscape of the Serra de Tramuntana
[Cultural Landscape of the Serra de Tramuntana | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Describes Mallorca's terraced mountain agriculture, dry-stone construction, roads, farms, water mills, irrigation networks, and combined Arab and Christian approaches to scarce water resources.
Cultural Landscape of Sintra
[Cultural Landscape of Sintra | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines the Portuguese landscape where Romantic architecture, palaces, gardens, forests, exotic vegetation, and mountainous terrain inspired landscape design across Europe.
Costiera Amalfitana
[Costiera Amalfitana | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Presents the Amalfi Coast as a steep Mediterranean cultural landscape transformed through settlements, terraced vineyards, citrus orchards, paths, architecture, and intensive adaptation to difficult terrain.
Colonies of Benevolence
[Colonies of Benevolence | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines 19th-century agricultural colonies in the Netherlands and Belgium created as an experiment in poverty relief, social engineering, farming, settlement planning, and landscape transformation.
Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park
[Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park with the Archaeological Sites of Paestum and Velia | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Connects Mediterranean ecosystems with ancient Greek settlements, historic routes, religious sites, agriculture, and long-established patterns of interaction between uplands and coastal communities.
Aranjuez Cultural Landscape
[Aranjuez Cultural Landscape | UNESCO World Heritage Centre | UNESCO | n.d.]
Examines the Spanish royal landscape where rivers, irrigation systems, agricultural areas, gardens, palace architecture, and planned urban spaces evolved together over several centuries.
