By Francisco Peyret
UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention will observe its 50th anniversary on November 16, celebrating the establishment of codes for the protection, care, and preservation of natural and cultural sites around the world. Why is it important to remember this date? Because many of those sites are at risk from the irresponsible and predatory behavior of human beings.
After the destruction of heritage left in the wake of the second World War, there was an initiative to protect these legacies. UNESCO promoted that certain sites should be declared World Heritage Sites to protect them as a legacy for humanity. Paradoxically, the protection is also from the harm caused by humanity itself. The initiative was prompted by armed conflict among nations. Today, we are experiencing something similar to those times because of the war in Ukraine. The war threatens the cultural heritage of a thousand-year-old city like Kyiv.
Unfortunately, over the last decades, we’ve seen irreparable damage to ancient cities because of wars, such as what has been lost in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and the former Yugoslavia, among others. But there is another threat to these ancient sites aside from war—something that we may not have foreseen 50 years ago. Who could have imagined that tourism and excessive real estate development could become the other great threat to World Heritage Sites? With gentrification, tourist overload, environmental impacts, and climate change, many designated heritage sites are currently being stressed.
Globalization is threatening other types of heritage, such as that defined by UNESCO as the oral and intangible heritage of humanity, which “includes all the living expressions and traditions that have been a legacy of our ancestors and that should be preserved so that they continue in the memory of future generations. This important heritage encompasses the world of the arts, all oral traditions, festivities, social customs, rituals, knowledge, and all that knowledge that enhances the lives of men.” The heritage of humanity encompasses cultural heritage, natural heritage, and mixed assets, classified as follows: 1) monuments, cities, urban landscapes, paintings, sculptures, archaeological sites; 2) cultural manifestations of the people, such as music, dance, traditional festivals, crafts, gastronomy, the different languages. etc.; 3) national parks, ecosystems, glaciers, tropical forests, caves, coral reefs, fauna and vegetation, mountains, etc.
Mexico has 35 World Heritage Sites in all the aforementioned categories. There are heritage cities, archaeological sites, prehistoric sites, missions, roads (like the Camina Real de Tierra Adentro), towns (Tequila), monuments, and even 20th-century works like the University City of UNAM.
There are also natural heritage sites, including Sian Ka’an in Quintana Roo; El Vizcaino Whale Sanctuary in Baja California Sur; islands and protected areas of the Gulf of California; the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Michoacán; El Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve in Sonora; and the Revillagigedo archipelago in the Pacific Ocean southwest of Cabo San Lucas.
And there are mixed estates, including the archaeological zone of Calakmul and its tropical forests in Campeche and the Valley of Tehuacán-Cuicatlán in the states of Puebla and Oaxaca.
Mexico is one of the top nations in the world with UNESCO declarations, but it also has thousands of buildings, works, and archaeological sites cataloged by the National Institute of History and Anthropology. There are hundreds of sites declared as protected natural areas, and countless indigenous communities, customs, and unrepeatable, authentic, and diverse intangible heritage. Mexico has a great legacy for the history of humanity, but that comes with a great responsibility for Mexicans and those who love this country. We live in times of great developments everywhere and lack of awareness of their impacts are a major challenge in the immediate future.
In 1803 the Prussian explorer Alexander Von Humboldt arrived in Mexico City. He saw mountains and flowing rivers and said that this was “the most transparent region” he had ever seen. More than a century later, this phrase was used by writer Carlos Fuentes to give that title to one of his novels. This “most transparent region” has not turned out so well 70 years later.
As a way to finish, I leave you with a poem of Octavio Paz, that refers to the intangible of Mexico:
“But there was no one by my side.
Only the plain: cacti, huizaches, huge stones that explode under the sun.
The cricket did not sing,
there was a vague smell of lime and burned seeds,
the streets of the town were dry streams,
and the air would have broken into a thousand pieces if someone had shouted: who lives?
Bare hills, sharp volcano, stone, and panting under so much splendor, drought, taste of dust, Rumor of bare feet on the dust, and the piru tree in the middle of the plain like a petrified fountain!”—from “The Broken Pitcher.”
