19 New UNESCO World Heritage Sites You Should Add To Your Travel Wish List

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xinjiang tianshan china

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UNESCO has added 19 new places to its list of World Heritage Sites this year.

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Two of the 19 new sites can be found in China and two in Italy. The rest represent a wide array of countries around the world.

For a site to be included on the World Heritage List, it must be "of outstanding universal value and meet at least one out of ten selection criteria," which help the committee to both classify potential sites and evaluate them based on their overall global importance. You can read the full list of criteria here.

Ultimately all sites considered must be of either "natural" or "cultural" significance. Fourteen of the sites named this year were cultural while just five were natural, but all of them are beautiful.