Spain and Portugal for Visitors

Posted by : John Ross on Aug 23, 2008 - 06:51 AM spainandportugal

The richness of Spain and Portugal's cultural and natural patrimony is reflected in the fact that they have 53 World Heritage sites between them, 40 in Spain and 13 in Portugal, which puts them near the top of the ranking (not that this is a competition, but Spain alone is second only to Italy, with 43 sites). And I have marked them all on a Google Map - see it here, or read on for more about the UNESCO World Heritage list.

The World Heritage list essentially exists to preserve places - towns, buildings, natural areas - the loss of which would make the world poorer. Its basic premise is that these places belong to everyone, not just to the local people, and even less to the government or administration found there at the time. This reasoning is easiest to see in places like Altamira, which existed long before there was such a thing as Spain or Portugal or their governments, and is considered "the apogee of Paleolithic cave art that developed across Europe, from the Urals to the Iberian Peninusula, from 35,000 to 11,000 BC." Who could dispute that something as transcendental belongs to the whole of humanity? Or Toledo, "the product of heterogeneous civilizations in an environment where the existence of three major religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – was a major factor." The Laurisilva of Madeira, "the largest surviving relict of the virtually extinct laurisilva forest type that was once widespread in Europe," must belong to the world, not just its islanders. Oporto, founded by the Romans who unimaginatively called it "Port" because that's what it was intended to be, has thrived under successive rules for two millenia, and its loss would be a tragedy. World Heritage status eases pressure on such places, not just from ""he traditional causes of decay, but also by changing social and economic conditions which aggravate the situation with even more formidable phenomena of damage or destruction" (read "development").

The basic instruments of the World Heritage movement are public opinion and the list itself - when an authority is negligent in managing a particular site, the threat to remove it from the World Heritage classification can be sufficient pressure to oblige the authority to be more attentive. This has happened recently in the UK, where plans to relieve Stonehenge of the pressure on it from traffic have been deemed inadequate by the World Heritage Committee.

But what has the most effect is public opinion. The World Heritage concept was formalized in the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, but the forces which led to it were earlier, specifically in the immense destruction caused by two world wars, and in the decision to build the Aswan High Dam in Egypt in the fifties, flooding the valley containing the Abu Simbel temples. A campaign managed by UNESCO raised $80 million dollars and the temples were relocated to dry land, demonstrating that effective intervention was not just a pipe-dream but both desirable and possible.