With its 20 kilometers of pristine valley, Dresden owned the famous UNESCO label since 2004. It was a crowning reward of years of meticulous reconstruction work of its Baroque gems that were reduced to a pile of stones in 1945 by the Allied bombings. Now, the Dresden Elbe Valley has to take the bitter pill. UNESCO recently dropped the place from its list of UN World Heritage Sites.

The reason: the construction of ‘a four-lane bridge in the heart of the cultural landscape.’ According to UNESCO, the building of the Waldschlösschen Bridge meant that the property ‘failed to keep its outstanding universal value as inscribed.’ The bridge was meant to decongest inner city traffic. The new bridge, according to UNESCO, ruins the view.

This was only the second time that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) had ever delisted a site. In 2007, the organization also delisted the Arabian Oryx Sanctuary in Oman. The country failed to ‘fulfill its conservation obligations with regard to the site.’

Some groups feel the brunt of the humiliation. Nobel Laureate for Medicine, Günter Blobel, says that of the hundreds of sites, many of them in poor countries, that try to save their heritages with limited resources, “In Germany, on the contrary, we spend 200 million euros to destroy one of our global heritages.”

The loss of the title is feared to have an impact on Dresden tourism.

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Via UN News Centre