Mexico Leads Latin America with Most UNESCO Cultural Heritage Sites The Yucatan Times
go to original January 4, 2013

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The leadership of Mexico as the country with the highest number of cultural assets recognized by UNESCO in Latin America, was endorsed last year with the recent inclusion of the Indigenous Arts Center in Veracruz, which was included in the Register of Best Practices for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage. Also, the celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the inscription of the sites of Teotihuacan and Monte Alban in the World Heritage List, along with El Tajin and Uxmal, which celebrated 20 and 16 years, respectively.

Today, Mexico has 31 cultural, natural and historical sites enrolled in the UNESCO international listing, which ranks it sixth worldwide and first in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Today, the World Heritage List of UNESCO have registered 936 sites located in 153 countries, of which 725 are cultural, 183 natural and 28 mixed in both categories. Mexico has 31 sites inscribed.

The pre-Hispanic cities of Uxmal, Teotihuacan, Monte Albán and El Tajín celebrated their anniversary of being part of the World Heritage List with diverse academic and cultural activities.

The archaeological site of Uxmal in Yucatan continues the celebration of its 16th anniversary of being part of the global list. The exhibition “Uxmal, Eight Decades of Exploration (1920-2012)”, consisting in 12 photograph from the past decades and 12 from now days, reveal the gradual recovery of the pre-Hispanic site, as result of several years of hard work and passion of archaeologists as Miguel Angel Fernandez, Alberto Ruz, Román Piña Chan, Jose and Jorge Reygadas Vértiz Acosta, among others.

“The attributes of the architecture of Uxmal and its surroundings, which have been recovered gradually, let this great city to be declared a World Heritage Site on December 7, 1996? explained the archaeologist José Huchim Herrera, director of the archaeological zone.

The photographic exhibition, which belongs to INAH Technical File, displayed in the tourist center of Uxmal, shows images that were part of activities reports from 1910 until the early ’50s. These old images are contrasted with a series of contemporary photographs taken last November by photographer Luis Alberto Pech Pech in order to allow visitors to compare and appreciate the efforts of various specialists to preserve this heritage.

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