UNESCO Heritage Sites

The Canal du Midi is one of the greatest engineering achievements of the modern age, providing the model for the flowering of technology that led directly to the Industrial Revolution and the modern technological age. It represents a significant period in European history that of the development of water transport as a result of mastery of hydraulic civil engineering. It combines with its technological innovation a concern for high aesthetic architectural and landscape design that has few parallels. Continent: Europe Country: France Category: Cultural Criterion: (I)(III) (IV) (VI) Date of Inscription: 1996 Canal du Midi Mediterranean-Atlantic link Investigations into the possibilities of creating canals joining the major natural waterways began in the early 16th century, when François I brought Leonardo da Vinci with him on his return to France. One of their projects envisaged linking the Garonne and the Aude rivers, and thus the Mediterranean with the Atlanti...

The historic city of Carcassonne is an excellent example of a medieval fortified town whose massive defences were constructed on walls dating from late antiquity. It is of exceptional significance by virtue of the restoration work carried out in the second half of the 19th century by Viollet-le-Duc, which had a profound influence on subsequent developments in conservation principles and practice. Since the pre-Roman period, a fortified settlement has existed on the hill where Carcassonne now stands. The earliest known occupation of the site dates from the 6th century BC, when a protohistoric hill fort (oppidum ) was built on this rocky spur overlooking the valley of the Aude and the ancient routes linking the Atlantic with the Mediterranean and the Iberian peninsula with the rest of Europe. In the 1st century BC, this settlement, Carcaso Volcarum Tectosagum, became the Latin Colonia Iulia Carcaso in 27 BC. During the turbulent years of the late 3rd and early 4th centuries, it was pro...

This serial property of 111 small individual sites encompasses the remains of prehistoric pile-dwelling settlements in and around the Alps built from around 5000 to 500 B.C. on the edges of lakes, rivers or wetlands. Excavations, only conducted in some of the sites, have yielded evidence that provides insight into life in prehistoric times during the Neolithic and Bronze Age in Alpine Europe and the way communities interacted with their environment. Fifty-six of the sites are located in Switzerland. The settlements are a unique group of exceptionally well-preserved and culturally rich archaeological sites, which constitute one of the most important sources for the study of early agrarian societies in the region. Continent: Europe Country: Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland Category: Cultural Criterion: (IV)(V) Date of Inscription: 2011

Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin is a remarkable landscape shaped over three centuries of coal extraction from the 1700s to the 1900s, consists of 109 separate components over 120,000-hectare. It features mining pits (the oldest of which dates from 1850) and lift infrastructure, slag heaps (some of which cover 90 hectares and exceed 140 metres in height), coal transport infrastructure, railway stations, workers estates and mining villages including social habitat, schools, religious buildings, health and community facilities, company premises, owners and managers' houses, town halls and more. The site bears testimony to the quest to create model workers' cities from the middle of the 19th century to the 1960s and further illustrates a significant period in the history of industrial Europe. It documents the living conditions of workers and the solidarity to which it gave rise. Continent: Europe Country: France Category: Cultural Criterion: (II)(IV) (VI) Date of In...