Built & Natural
Heritage

Adam's Peak — Sri Pada, the Sacred Footprint — is a 2,243-metre conical mountain in the Sri Lankan highlands whose summit rock formation is venerated as a sacred footprint by four of the world's major religions simultaneously. For over a thousand years, pilgrims of all these faiths have climbed 5,500 steps through the night to reach the same summit at the same dawn, making it one of the oldest continuously shared sacred sites in the world. The mountain's surrounding cloud forest is a biodiversity hotspot containing over 150 endemic plant species found nowhere else on earth.

The most complex and biodiverse terrestrial ecosystem on earth, containing approximately 10 percent of all species on the planet within 5.5 million square kilometres of living forest, home to approximately 400 Indigenous nations speaking around 300 languages, holding an estimated 150 to 200 billion tonnes of carbon in its biomass and soils, and currently approaching a scientifically projected tipping point beyond which large areas may transition irreversibly toward savannah.

An archipelago of 19 major islands and dozens of smaller ones, rising from three converging oceanic currents at the intersection of the Pacific, Nazca, and Cocos tectonic plates, isolated from the South American mainland by nearly 1,000 kilometres of open ocean. The islands contain one of the world's highest concentrations of endemic species — animals and plants found nowhere else on earth — including marine iguanas, flightless cormorants, Galápagos penguins, giant tortoises, and Darwin's finches, whose adaptive radiation across the archipelago provided Charles Darwin with the observational foundation for the theory of natural selection. The ecological integrity that makes these species possible is under accelerating pressure from invasive species, climate change-driven ocean warming, and the tourism and fishing economies whose growth has outpaced the management capacity of the institutions responsible for protecting the islands.

The largest living structure on earth — an intricate lacework of 2,800 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching 2,300 kilometres along the Queensland coastline, supporting 400 coral species, 1,500 fish species, six of the world's seven sea turtle species, and roughly 30 marine mammal species including dugongs. It is the only biological system visible from space with the naked eye, and by almost any ecological metric the most significant marine ecosystem on the planet. It is also, by any honest measure, a system under severe and accelerating stress.

Cappadocia is a landscape carved by ten million years of volcanic eruption and erosion into fairy chimneys, cliff faces, and deep valleys into which Christian communities carved entire cities from the living rock. The Byzantine cave churches of the Göreme valley contain some of the finest fresco cycles of the Middle Byzantine period, preserved by the same tuff that now vibrates each morning as up to 200 hot air balloons float above them.

Pamukkale — Cotton Castle in Turkish — is a thermal spring site where calcium carbonate-rich waters have built travertine terraces of luminous white over hundreds of thousands of years. Above them sits Hierapolis, a Graeco-Roman spa city with a complete theatre, one of the world's largest Graeco-Roman necropoleis, and the Plutonium — a cave confirmed in 2013 to emit lethal carbon dioxide concentrations that ancient writers understood as a literal entrance to the underworld and that modern tourists enter with the same cameras they use everywhere else.

Koobi Fora, on the eastern shore of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, is the most productive fossil site for early human evolution on earth. Since systematic research began in 1968, the sediments of the Koobi Fora Formation have yielded over 10,000 fossil vertebrate specimens including hundreds of hominin fossils representing at least four species of early human, spanning a period from approximately 4 million to 1.5 million years ago. The site has produced some of the most significant individual fossils in the history of paleoanthropology, including the skull KNM-ER 1470 (Homo rudolfensis), which when discovered in 1972 pushed back the origin of the Homo genus by nearly one million years. Koobi Fora is not one site. It is a landscape of paleoanthropological evidence stretching over 1,500 square kilometres of badlands along the eastern shore of the largest desert lake in the world.

Roopkund is a glacial lake at 5,029 metres elevation in the Indian Himalayas containing the skeletal remains of approximately 800 individuals — visible when the ice melts in summer, scattered on the lake bed and surrounding slopes. A 2019 ancient DNA study found three genetically distinct population groups among the dead, including 14 individuals of Eastern Mediterranean ancestry dated to the 18th century CE at a remote Himalayan location. No explanation has achieved scholarly consensus. The remains are disappearing — removed by trekkers, dispersed by meltwater, exposed by retreating glacial ice — and there is no legal framework specifically protecting them.

The Serengeti is a 14,763 square kilometre savanna ecosystem in northern Tanzania that sustains the largest terrestrial mammal migration on earth: 1.5 million wildebeest, 200,000 zebra, and 500,000 gazelle completing an annual circuit of approximately 3,000 kilometres through Tanzania and Kenya, following the rains and the grass. It is one of the last intact large mammal assemblages on the planet, and the annual migration — crossing the Mara River through crocodile-filled waters — is widely considered one of the greatest wildlife spectacles in the natural world.

The Jungfrau-Aletsch region in the Swiss Alps encompasses the largest glacier in the Alps — the 23-kilometre Aletsch Glacier — and the most heavily glaciated area in western Eurasia. The landscape includes several of the highest peaks in the Alps, the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau, whose north faces present some of the most challenging and most storied mountaineering terrain in the world. The glacier is a critical freshwater reservoir for much of central Europe and a reference site for climate science: its retreat over the past 150 years is one of the most visually documented examples of glacier loss on the planet.

Uluru is a 348-metre sandstone inselberg in the centre of Australia, rising abruptly from the flat red desert of the Northern Territory like a geological anomaly that demands explanation. It is 9.4 kilometres in circumference, and most of its mass extends underground. To the Anangu people, the traditional custodians of this landscape, Uluru is not a rock formation with cultural significance attached to it. It is the materialised record of the Tjukurpa, the Anangu law and creation narrative, written in geology at the Dreaming. Every feature of its surface corresponds to a specific event in the creation story. The site is simultaneously one of the most recognisable natural formations on earth and one of the most sacred places in Aboriginal Australian spiritual geography.