Mexico - Wixárika Route through Sacred Sites to Wirikuta (Tatehuarí Huajuyé) - 2025

The Huichol Route is a serial property of 20 sites, spanning over 500 km across five states in north-central Mexico. This “braid of trails” connects sacred landscapes central to the spiritual and cultural practices of the Wixárika Indigenous Peoples. Beginning in the Huichol Sierra, the route leads to Wirikuta in the Chihuahuan Desert, with additional sacred sites in Nayarit and Durango. Traversing diverse ecological regions, the route supports rituals tied to ancestral deities, agriculture, and community well-being. Known as “Tatehuarí Huajuyé” or the Path of Our Grandfather Fire, it embodies deep spiritual and environmental significance.

Jamaica - The Archaeological Ensemble of 17th Century Port Royal (2025)

The town of Port Royal is located at the mouth of Kingston Harbour in southeastern Jamaica. It was a major 17th-century English port city. A devastating earthquake in 1692 submerged much of the town under water and sand. Today, its terrestrial and underwater remains offer rare insights into urban colonial life. Once a key hub for transatlantic trade—including the trade of enslaved Africans—Port Royal featured a deep-water port and six defensive forts, some now submerged. Archaeological evidence reveals a well-preserved layout of residential, religious, and administrative buildings, serving as a distinctive marker of British colonial presence in the Caribbean.

Brazil - Cavernas do Peruaçu National Park (2025)

 Located in northern Minas Gerais and featuring dramatic karst landscapes, vast caves, and rich biodiversity, the park’s horizontal cave systems, formed in carbonate rock, reveal striking speleothems, collapsed dolines, limestone arches, and underground rivers. Developed in the stable São Francisco craton, the landscape reflects major climatic and geological changes from the Plio-Pleistocene. The park lies at the intersection of the Cerrado, Caatinga, and Atlantic Forest biomes, supporting over 2,000 plant and animal species, including many threatened ones.

Canada - Anticosti

Situated on the island of Anticosti, the largest island in Quebec, this property is the most complete and best preserved palaeontological record of the first mass extinction of animal life, 447-437 million years ago. It contains the best preserved fossil record of marine life covering 10 million years of Earth history. The abundance, diversity, and exquisite preservation of the fossils are exceptional and allow for world-class scientific work. Thousands of large bedding surfaces allow the observation and study of shell and sometimes soft-bodied animals that lived on the shallow sea floor of an ancient tropical sea.

Suriname - Jodensavanne Archaeological Site: Jodensavanne Settlement and Cassipora Creek Cemetery

 Located on the densely forested banks of the Suriname River, the Jodensavanne Archaeological Site in northern Suriname is a serial property that illustrates early Jewish colonization attempts in the New World. The Jodensavanne Settlement, founded in the 1680s, includes the ruins of what is believed to be the earliest synagogue of architectural significance in the Americas, along with cemeteries, boat landing areas, and a military post. The Cassipora Creek Cemetery is the remnant of an older settlement founded in the 1650s. Located amidst Indigenous territory, the settlements were inhabited, owned, and governed by Jews who lived there together with free and enslaved persons of African descent. The settlements had the most extensive arrangement of privileges and immunities known in the early modern Jewish world.

Guatemala - National Archaeological Park Tak’alik Ab’aj

"Tak’alik Ab’aj is an archaeological site located on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala. Its 1,700-year history spans a period that saw the transition from the Olmec civilization to the emergence of Early Mayan culture. Tak’alik Ab’aj had a primary role in this transition, in part because it was vital to the long-distance trade route that connected the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in today's Mexico to present-day El Salvador. Ideas and customs were shared extensively along this route. Sacred spaces and buildings were laid out according to cosmological principles, and innovative water management systems, ceramics, and lapidary art can be found. Today, Indigenous groups of different affiliations still consider the site a sacred place and visit it to perform rituals."

Source: UNESCO World Heritage Site

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Missing - Chile - Settlement and Artificial Mummification of the Chinchorro Culture in the Arica and Parinacota Region

 "The property consists of three components: Faldeo Norte del Morro de Arica, Colón 10, both in the city of Arica, and Desembocadura de Camarones, in a rural environment some 100km further south. Together they bear testimony to a culture of marine hunter-gatherers who resided in the arid and hostile northern coast of the Atacama Desert in northernmost Chile from approximately 5450 BCE to 890 BCE. The property presents the oldest known archaeological evidence of the artificial mummification of bodies with cemeteries that contain both artificially mummified bodies and some that were preserved due to environmental conditions. Over time, the Chinchorro perfected complex mortuary practices, whereby they systematically dismembered and reassembled bodies of deceased men, women and children of the entire social spectrum to create “artificial” mummies. These mummies possess material, sculptural, and aesthetic qualities that are presumed to reflect the fundamental role of the dead in Chinchorro society. Tools made of mineral and plant materials as well as simple instruments made of bone and shells that enabled an intensive exploitation of marine resources, have been found in the property which bears a unique testimony to the complex spirituality of the Chinchorro culture."

Source: UNESCO World Heritage

Missing - Uruguay - The work of engineer Eladio Dieste: Church of Atlántida

 "The Church of Atlántida with its belfry and underground baptistery is located in Estación Atlántida, 45 km away from Montevideo. Inspired by Italian paleo-Christian and medieval religious architecture, the modernistic Church complex, inaugurated in 1960, represents a novel utilization of exposed and reinforced brick. Built on rectangular plan of one single hall, the church features distinctive undulating walls supporting a similarly undulating roof, composed of a sequence of reinforced brick Gaussian vaults developed by Eladio Dieste (1917-2000). The cylindrical bell-tower, built in openwork exposed brick masonry, rises from the ground to the right of the main church facade, while the underground baptistery is located on the left side of the parvis, accessible from a triangular prismatic entrance and illuminated via a central oculus. The Church provides an eminent example of the remarkable formal and spatial achievements of modern architecture in Latin America during the second part of the 20th century, embodying the search for social equality with a spare use of resources, meeting structural imperatives to great aesthetic effect."

Source: UNESCO World Heritage

Missing - Peru - Chankillo Archaeoastronomical Complex

"Chankillo Archaeoastronomical Complex is a prehistoric site (250-200 BC), located on the north-central coast of Peru, in the Casma Valley, comprising a set of constructions in a desert landscape that, together with natural features, functioned as a calendrical instrument, using the sun to define dates throughout the year. The site includes a triple-walled hilltop complex, known as the Fortified Temple, two building complexes called Observatory and Administrative Centre, a line of 13 cuboidal towers stretching along the ridge of a hill, and the Cerro Mucho Malo that complements the Thirteen Towers as a natural marker. The ceremonial centre was probably dedicated to a solar cult, and the presence of an observation point on either side of the north-south line of the Thirteen Towers allows the observation both of the solar rising and setting points throughout the whole year. The site shows great innovation by using the solar cycle and an artificial horizon to mark the solstices, the equinoxes, and every other date within the year with a precision of 1-2 days. It is thus a testimony of the culmination of a long historical evolution of astronomical practices in the Casma Valley."

Source: UNESCO World Heritage

Missing - Argentina - Los Alerces National Park

"The Los Alerces National Park is located in the Andes of northern Patagonia and has a western boundary, which coincides with the Chilean border. Successive glaciations have moulded the landscape in the region creating spectacular features such as moraines, glacial cirques and clear-water lakes. The vegetation is dominated by dense temperate forests, which give way to alpine meadows higher up under the rocky Andean peaks. The property is vital for the protection of some of the last portions of continuous Patagonian Forest in an almost pristine state and is the habitat for a number of endemic and threatened species of flora and fauna."

Source: UNESCO World Heritage

Missing - Colombia - Chiribiquete National Park – “The Maloca of the Jaguar”

"Located in the north-west Colombian Amazon, Chiribiquete National Park is the largest protected area in the country. One of the defining features of the park is the presence of tepuis (the Native American word for table-top mountains), sheer-sided sandstone plateaux that dominate the forest. Over 75,000 paintings, spanning more than 20,000 years to the present, are to be seen on the walls of the 60 rock shelters around the bases of the tepuis. Believed to be linked to the worship of the jaguar, a symbol of power and fertility, these paintings depict hunting scenes, battles, dances and ceremonies. The indigenous communities, which are not directly present on the site, consider the region sacred."

Source: UNESCO World Heritage Site

Missing - Costa Rica - Cocos Island National Park

"Cocos Island National Park, located 550 km off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, is the only island in the tropical eastern Pacific with a tropical rainforest. Its position as the first point of contact with the northern equatorial counter-current, and the myriad interactions between the island and the surrounding marine ecosystem, make the area an ideal laboratory for the study of biological processes. The underwater world of the national park has become famous due to the attraction it holds for divers, who rate it as one of the best places in the world to view large pelagic species such as sharks, rays, tuna and dolphins." Source: UNESCO World Heritage

Missing - Colombia - Los Katíos National Park

"Extending over 72,000 ha in north-western Colombia, Los Katios National Park comprises low hills, forests and humid plains. An exceptional biological diversity is found in the park, which is home to many threatened animal species, as well as many endemic plants." 

Source: UNESCO World Heritage

Missing - Costa Rica - Precolumbian chiefdom settlements with stone spheres of Diquís

"Precolumbian Chiefdom Settlements with Stone Spheres of the Diquis includes four archaeological sites located in the Diquis Delta in southern Costa Rica, which are considered unique examples of the complex social, economic and political systems of the period between 500-1500 AD. They contain artificial mounds, paved areas, burial sites and, most significantly, a collection of stone spheres, between 0.7m and 2.57m in diameter, whose meaning, use and production remain largely a mystery. The spheres are distinctive for their perfection, their number, size and density, and their placement in their original locations. Their preservation from the looting that befell the vast majority of archeological sites in Costa Rica has been attributed to the thick layers of sediment that kept them buried for centuries."

Source: UNESCO World Heritage

I am looking for a postcard of this 2014 UNESCO WHS.

Missing - Honduras - Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve

"Located on the watershed of the Río Plátano, the reserve is one of the few remains of a tropical rainforest in Central America and has an abundant and varied plant and wildlife. In its mountainous landscape sloping down to the Caribbean coast, over 2,000 indigenous people have preserved their traditional way of life." Source: UNESCO World Heritage