At the most recent sitting of the World Heritage Committee, the Primeval Beech Forest of the Carpathian (Ukraine and Slovakia) was added to the World Heritage List.
Last month in Christchurch, New Zealand, the World Heritage Committee met to consider which sites to add to their World Heritage list. After much consideration (and long discussion, it seems), they added just 22 sites, bringing the total of properties on the World Heritage list to 851.
The ones that made the headlines when they were added were places like the Sydney Opera House and the Old Town of Corfu in Greece, but there was also one addition from the Eastern European zone. The he Primeval Beech Forest of the Carpathian (Ukraine and Slovakia) was inscribed on the list as a natural property.
The reasons for adding this forest given by the World Heritage Committee were:
The Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathian constitute a transnational serial property of ten separate components along a 185 km axis from the Rakhiv Mountains and the Chornohirskyi Range in the Ukraine, west along the Polonynian Ridge, to the Bukovské Vrchy and Vihorlat Mountains in Slovakia. The ten sites represent an outstanding example of undisturbed, complex temperate forests and exhibit the most complete and comprehensive ecological patterns and processes of pure stands of European beech across a variety of environmental conditions. They contain an invaluable genetic reservoir of beech.
This area is relatively rarely visited by tourists, but after being added to the World Heritage list, that will probably change, although it will hopefully be in a controlled and careful way.
