India, Angola, Peru and the Moon: See who's on the endangered heritage sites list

Hindustan Times

03-05-2025

If you're watching the full moon set behind the Taj Mahal, you're likely looking at two endangered heritage sites in one frame.
The Sea of Tranquility on the moon recently became the first off-world site to make it to the list of most-endangered monuments, released every two years by the American NGO World Monuments Fund (WMF). The Taj Mahal, incidentally, was on the first such list, in 1996.
Over nearly three decades, WMF has highlighted heritage sites at risk from factors such as excessive tourism, conflicts and wars, natural disasters, and climate change. The first list featured 100 sites, drawn from public nominations that were then vetted by an expert panel. The last list before this year's featured 25 sites, including Kolkata's Tiretta Bazaar, India's original Chinatown.
Once a list is released, WMF collaborates with local governments and organisations to help raise funding, and to design targeted conservation programmes, for the monuments. In 2023, for instance, a Watch Day was organised in this manner at Tiretta Bazaar. It featured traditional Chinese dragon dances, lantern-making workshops and heritage walks. Celebrations culminated in a presentation at the historic Nam Soon temple, the result of a four-month study titled Know Your Cheenapara (Chinatown).
Two Indian sites have made the list this year. In all, 25 have been added, including the one on the Moon. What threatens the most unusual of these? What will it take to protect them?
The Sea of Tranquility
There is, famously, a flagpole and a boot print here, dating to the earliest Moon landings.
Because of its unusually flat surface, this plain has served as the landing pad for manned missions, rovers and landing modules over more than 50 years. So, there are also another 104 artefacts strewn about. These range from discarded equipment and human waste to a family photo and a tiny replica of an astronaut, placed there as a tribute to the lives lost in this quest.
Now, with travel into space growing, and plans for tourism in Low Earth Orbit as well as construction on the moon, WMF is arguing that the Sea of Tranquility needs to be protected from incursions, souvenir-gathering and theft.
'The Moon is included on the Watch to reflect the urgent need to recognise and preserve the artifacts that testify to humanity's first steps beyond Earth,' WMF president and CEO Bénédicte de Montlaur said in a statement. 'Items… face mounting risks amidst accelerating lunar activities, undertaken without adequate preservation protocols.'
Hamirsar Lake System, Bhuj, India
Water is power, in a desert. It is prestige. And, of course, it is life.
For all these reasons, nearly 500 years ago, a king in Kutch named Rao Khengarji commissioned a grand water-harvesting project. At the heart of it was the giant manmade Hamirsar Lake, 28 acres in area. Around it was a network of canals, stepwells and secondary reservoirs. The water system was designed to capture and capitalise on any rain that fell across a 35-sq-km area. And it did.
Rao Khengarji lived to see visitors marvel at these expanses of shimmering water at the heart of the otherwise-arid walled city of Bhuj.
'As the city continues to change and expand, it urgently needs to invest in its historic water infrastructure, to build a strong and resilient community through culture-based climate action,' says Jigna Desai, who heads the Centre for Heritage Conservation at CEPT (Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology) University in Ahmedabad. She and colleague Jayashree Bardhan crafted the nomination for this site.
Musi River Historic Buildings, Hyderabad, India
The Musi River weaves through Hyderabad's historic city centre, through the premises of the high court, state central library and Osmania hospital, among other sites.
It has been so encroached upon that it often causes flooding, inundating the basement of the hospital, for instance, with absurd regularity.
In recent years, growing pollution from industrial effluents has made the water corrosive. This is affecting the structures that line its banks, most notably the hospital.
Completed in 1925, Osmania General Hospital, with its many decorative domes, elaborate arches and once-striking white limestone and lime plaster exterior, is a historic example of Indo-Saracenic design.
Now ravaged by time, poor maintenance and the frequent flooding, it is still in use. The Telangana government has yo-yoed in recent times between demolishing it and preserving the building as a heritage monument.
The Waru Waru agricultural system, Peru
This remarkable feat of engineering and adaptation dates to about 300 BCE.
It consists of raised fields in the floodplains of Lake Titicaca that still grow potatoes and quinoa, and are still fed by ancient irrigation channels that form giant geometric patterns in the land.
The raised cultivation beds still help protect fields from floods and frost. Efficient water management allows for greater crop diversity. But the system is now under threat from modernisation and climate change.
Successive years of drought are causing families to migrate to cities, leaving their Waru Waru fields behind. Modern machinery and intensive livestock farming have caused disruptions too. There is concern within the community that the practises used to tend to such fields, for thousands of years, are being forgotten.
WMF, in its citation, has announced plans to work with the local Suma Yapu Aymara indigenous association and the Regional Cultural Office of Puno, to preserve a system that represents ancient knowledge and potentially offers sustainable solutions, amid the climate crisis.
Occaneechi aka Great Trading Path, USA
This trade route started out as a group of minor footpaths through the hills of North Carolina's Piedmont region, in the 1600s.
It was worn into the ground by members of indigenous tribes such as the Occaneechi and others of the Siouan language family. They prospered as middlemen in the fur and deerskin trade, doing business with colonial newcomers at the time.
At its fullest extent, the Path stretched more than 400 km, from present-day Petersburg, Virginia, to Charlotte, North Carolina. It then split into two and extended through South Carolina.
Over time, paved roads, railways and highways appeared along the route.
The segments of the path that remain intact hold sacred sites where Native American powwows (gatherings that involved dancing, singing and feasting) and religious ceremonies were once held.
The listing by World Monuments Fund could help protect what's left of the ancient highway and the sacred sites along it from destruction and erasure, Dr Crystal Cavalier-Keck, an activist and a citizen of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, has said in interviews.
Cinema Studio Namibe, Angola
In the port city of Moçâmedes, Angola, is a cinema hall of soaring arches, designed to look like a domed spaceship or a giant, otherworldly tree.
Construction on the structure was halted 50 years ago, and what was built is now slowly decaying.
Cinema Studio Namibe was designed by the Portuguese architect José Botelho Pereira, and is an early example of tropical Modernist architecture. The structure is meant to represent is the primeval Welwitschia plant endemic to the Namib desert.
In its decay, the structure echoes the recent history of Angola — construction began in 1973 and had to be halted two years later, amid a Civil War that broke out then and raged on for about three decades.
The Provincial Government of Namibe has classified the cinema hall as a piece of historical and cultural heritage. There are plans to conserve it with help from corporate sponsors.