World Heritage
Where UNESCO's listed places sit: which metros and countries hold the most, and when they were inscribed.
Data as of
1,273 sites · 744 in a metro · UNESCO World Heritage Centre, open data
- 1,273World Heritage sites991 cultural, 240 natural, 42 mixed
- 744Inside a metro529 sit outside every metro and credit their country only
- 800Metros with a site173 countries hold at least one
- 58On the danger list51 sites are shared across borders
- 408Creative Cities designations307 placed in a metro
- 849Intangible heritage elements716 representative, 90 urgent safeguarding, 43 good practice
Sites by metro and country
Pick the year to see the boards as they stood then. Sites are counted once per place.
How this is measured
A serial site (a set of separate places listed together) counts for a metro when any of its component points falls inside the metro boundary, and once only however many components do. A site with no component list uses its main coordinate. A site outside every metro boundary credits its country only.
A site shared between states counts once for each state on UNESCO’s own list, so country counts add up to more than the 1,273 distinct sites. Per million divides by the place’s population on this site.
Beijing: 8 sites
Metro page- Imperial Palaces of the Ming and Qing Dynasties in Beijing and ShenyangCultural · inscribed 1987 · 1 of 2 components here
- Peking Man Site at ZhoukoudianCultural · inscribed 1987
- The Great WallCultural · inscribed 1987 · 1 of 3 components here
- Summer Palace, an Imperial Garden in BeijingCultural · inscribed 1998
- Temple of Heaven: an Imperial Sacrificial Altar in BeijingCultural · inscribed 1998
- Imperial Tombs of the Ming and Qing DynastiesCultural · inscribed 2000 · 1 of 14 components here
- The Grand CanalCultural · inscribed 2014 · 2 of 31 components here
- Beijing Central Axis: A Building Ensemble Exhibiting the Ideal Order of the Chinese CapitalCultural · inscribed 2024
Creative Cities in this metro: Beijing (Design, 2012).
800 metros hold at least one site. Pick a metro name to list its sites.
Where these numbers come from14 Oct 2026
World Heritage sites, Creative Cities and Intangible Cultural Heritage come from UNESCO’s open data portal (data.unesco.org, datasets whc001, cce001 and ich001), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Attribution: UNESCO. The same World Heritage List is published at whc.unesco.org. This page reshapes it and adds its own mapping to metros; UNESCO has not reviewed that mapping.
Each component coordinate is tested against the site’s metro boundaries; there is no nearest-city fallback, so a site beside a metro but outside its boundary is counted for its country only. The Old City of Jerusalem has no country on UNESCO’s list and credits a metro but no country. One site has no published coordinate and credits its country only.
UNESCO publishes Creative Cities by city and field, with no country or coordinates. Each city is placed using Wikidata (membership of the Creative Cities Network, coordinates, country), then the site’s municipality sheet. A city that could not be placed is left out of the metro tally rather than guessed. Intangible heritage is counted by country only, from UNESCO’s three lists, with a shared element counted once for each state.