Enlarge image
Danube in the Kelheim district in Lower Bavaria
Photo: Armin Weigel / dpa
Unesco has designated the Danube Limes as part of the border of the ancient Roman Empire as a new world heritage site.
The responsible committee of the UN Organization for Education, Science, Culture and Communication (Unesco) announced the decision on Friday at its 44th meeting in Fuzhou, China.
In its Bavarian section, the Danube Limes extends from Bad Gögging in the Kelheim district via Regensburg and Straubing to Passau.
At the current Unesco meeting, which will run until this Saturday (July 31), Germany has already received its fifth award. Before the decision on Friday, tension had risen after Hungary left the joint application with Germany, Austria and Slovakia at short notice. The committee then postponed the decision that was actually planned for Monday and initially set up a working group for further deliberations.
The Limes stretched from Great Britain across Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East to North Africa.
Unesco is striving for the complete transnational inscription of the 6000 kilometers long "borders of the Roman Empire".
On Tuesday, the Lower Germanic Limes was added to the World Heritage List, which runs for around 400 kilometers along the Rhine.
The border section begins in Rheinbrohl in Rhineland-Palatinate and ends at the North Sea in the Netherlands.
In North Rhine-Westphalia there are 220 kilometers between Bonn and Kleve.
The fortifications of Hadrian's Wall and Antonine Wall in Great Britain (1987/2008) and the Upper German-Raetian Limes in Germany (2005) had already received awards.
The World Heritage Committee that decided on the award is made up of 21 elected contracting states to the 1972 World Heritage Convention.
As a rule, it decides annually on the registration of new cultural and natural sites in the World Heritage List.
Because of the pandemic, the conference was postponed last year.
There are more than 1100 cultural and natural sites in 167 countries on the World Heritage List.
51 of them are considered threatened.
ime / dpa