UNESCO has just announced on its website that Rabat, Morocco has been named a World Heritage Site along side such places as the Church of the Nativity and the Rock Islands Southern Lagoon in Palau.
While understanding the important role historic Rabat had in Moroccan history and in the history of the Western Mediterranean, one wonders if the UNESCO people have seen the city since the recent strike by garbage collectors. The mounds of rotting trash are quite a sight in themselves.
______________________
New sites have been inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage
List: Birthplace of Jesus: the Church of the Nativity and the Pilgrimage
Route, Bethlehem (Palestine); Site of Human Evolution at Mount Carmel:
The Nahal Me’arot/Wadi el-Mughara Caves (Israel), Rock Islands Southern
Lagoon (Palau), and The Cultural Landscape of Bali: the Subak System as a
Manifestation of the Tri Hita Karana Philosophy (Indonesia), Rabat,
modern capital and historic City: a shared heritage (Morocco).
Rabat, modern capital and historic City (Morocco): a shared heritage, on Atlantic coast in the northwest of the country, is the product of a fertile exchange between the Arabo-Muslim past and Western modernism. The inscribed city encompasses the new town conceived and built under the French Protectorate from 1912 to the 1930s, including royal and administrative areas, residential and commercial developments and the Jardins d’Essais botanical and pleasure gardens. It also encompasses older parts of the city dating back to the he 12th century. The new town is one of the largest and most ambitious modern urban projects built in Africa in the 20th century and probably the most complete. The older parts include Hassan Mosque (started in 1184) and the Almohad ramparts and gates, the only surviving parts of the project for a great capital city of the Almohad caliphate as well as remains from the Moorish, or Andalusian, principality of the 17th century.
While understanding the important role historic Rabat had in Moroccan history and in the history of the Western Mediterranean, one wonders if the UNESCO people have seen the city since the recent strike by garbage collectors. The mounds of rotting trash are quite a sight in themselves.
______________________
Friday, June 29, 2012
Rabat, modern capital and historic City (Morocco): a shared heritage, on Atlantic coast in the northwest of the country, is the product of a fertile exchange between the Arabo-Muslim past and Western modernism. The inscribed city encompasses the new town conceived and built under the French Protectorate from 1912 to the 1930s, including royal and administrative areas, residential and commercial developments and the Jardins d’Essais botanical and pleasure gardens. It also encompasses older parts of the city dating back to the he 12th century. The new town is one of the largest and most ambitious modern urban projects built in Africa in the 20th century and probably the most complete. The older parts include Hassan Mosque (started in 1184) and the Almohad ramparts and gates, the only surviving parts of the project for a great capital city of the Almohad caliphate as well as remains from the Moorish, or Andalusian, principality of the 17th century.
No comments:
Post a Comment