THE Dolomite mountains in northern Italy and architectural works by Le Corbusier are among sites nominated to join UNESCO's World Heritage List at a meeting that began Monday in Spain. The World Heritage Committee will also consider taking the rare step of dropping a site, in Germany, because a construction project is encroaching upon it. The committee is meeting in the southern city of Seville for a week to consider nominations for 27 sites, including works by Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier in Argentina, Belgium, France, Germany, Japan and Switzerland. Most nominated sites are cultural, such as monuments or old quarters of cities, but others are natural parks or sites that boast both culture and countryside. The list already features 878 properties deemed to have “outstanding universal value” and thus be so precious as to belong to humanity in general, not just the country where they are located. Governments that nominate sites must present a specific plan for their upkeep, and the heritage committee regularly inspects them, although it provides no funding except in case of emergencies like natural disasters. Sites on the list range from the Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia to the Versailles palace in France. Thirty of them are on a danger watch-list because of threats from pollution, urban development, poorly managed mass tourism, war or natural disaster. One is the cultural landscape of Germany's Dresden Elbe Valley. UNESCO says it will come under “particular scrutiny” as the committee decides whether to erase the property from the list because of the building of a bridge in the heart of the landscape. Only once before has a site been dropped from the list. That happened in 2007, after a site in Oman that was a sanctuary for a highly endangered kind of antelope called the Arabian Oryx was reduced by 90 percent by the government of that country. UNESCO says the committee will also discuss the challenge posed by an ever-growing list and the cost involved for UNESCO of sending experts to monitor sites. Since the first sites were added in 1978 - they were Ecuador's Galapagos Islands and the city of Quito - the list has grown to include forms of heritage other than churches and natural parks. Now, it features samples of modern architecture and industrial sites such as the Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works in Chile. There, in one of the driest deserts on Earth, South American workers lived in company towns, forged a distinctive communal culture for 60 years starting in 1880 and waged a pioneering struggle for social justice, UNESCO says. Including such sites “illustrates the fact that World Heritage is a living concept. The list reflects evolving thinking on culture and nature,” Francesco Bandarin, director of UNESCO's World Heritage Centre, wrote on the UNESCO Web site.
