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October 13, 2005

View All the World Heritage Sites

A collection of placemarks showing all 788 of the UNESCO World Heritage sites was first published at the Google Earth Community forums a year ago. The World Heritage sites include things like the Statue of Liberty, Grand Canyon, Timbuktu, etc. Having a site marked a World Heritage Site can greatly improve tourism as I witnessed down in the Caribbean.

The first release of this collection was for Keyhole and was published in October 2004 by "aladdin" here, but the links are now kind of broken. Then shortly after Google Earth beta first released someone called "Herrminator" wrote a script to enhance the collection with better descriptions, photos, and even the sub-sites (those Heritage sites which have multiple locations). You can download the improved World Heritage sites and make sure you click on the placemarks to read the descriptions. Here's the forum post where Herminator keeps his collection.

By the way, some of the locations of the placemarks apparently are incorrect. This is a problem with the World Heritage's own database, not the GE file. If you find an incorrect location of a placemark, contact the people at the World Heritage web site and let them know. Herminator occasionally re-runs his scripts and updates the collection and will capture any corrections.

Writing a story about this collection slipped through the cracks as I was preparing to create the Google Earth Blog this summer, I just assumed I had written about it. It is definitely worth checking out, and if it isn't already in the Wikipedia, I will add it.

Posted by FrankTaylor at October 13, 2005 08:15 AM

  • Google Earth Blog © 2005, 2006, 2007 Copyright by Frank Taylor. All Rights Reserved.
  • All image screenshots from Google Earth are Copyright by Google


    • Comments

    I like it

    Posted by: shri ram at October 14, 2005 07:06 AM

    There are now 812 sites ;-) and the placemarks have been updated!

    Posted by: Herrminator at October 15, 2005 01:14 PM

    Thanks for the update on the statistics!

    Posted by: Frank Taylor at October 16, 2005 11:58 AM

    Nice site.
    Check out this introduction article on World Heritage Site:
    http://www.articleworld.org/World_Heritage_Site

    Posted by: World Heritage Site at June 8, 2006 06:19 PM

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