Heritage & Culture

One of the oldest botanical gardens in the southern hemisphere, and the clearest surviving record of the plant economy that indenture was imported to serve.

A crater lake in the Mauritian highlands, the most important Hindu site on the island and the focus of the largest Hindu pilgrimage outside India.

The last of the native forest of Mauritius, on 3.5 per cent of the island, holding species that exist nowhere else. On the Tentative List, not inscribed.

The basalt mountain at the southwest corner where escaped slaves sheltered, inscribed for what is remembered about it rather than for what is built on it.

Sixteen hundred square meters of stone steps in Port Louis, where a system that moved half a million people and reshaped the labor of empires began.

Greetings that take time, a matrilineal inheritance system and a masked society older than the state. How to be a good guest in Malawi.

Nsima is not a side dish in Malawi, it is the meal, and UNESCO inscribed the whole tradition around it. What to eat and how it is eaten.

Malawi sat on the eastern slave route, not the Atlantic one. The lake carried captives to Kilwa, and the trail that records it is on the Tentative List.

UNESCO compares this park to the Galapagos finches. Hundreds of cichlid species, nearly all found nowhere else, in one clear corner of the lake.

The richest concentration of rock art in Central Africa, painted by BaTwa hunter-gatherers and by Chewa farmers, and still used in initiation today.

Malawi newest World Heritage property is a mountain inscribed for what it means, not for how it looks: a sacred landscape of the Yao, Manganja and Lhomwe.

The plateau above the old capital, where the colonial administration went to escape the heat. Forest, escarpment and long views, and no World Heritage listing.