Turkey’s 22 UNESCO World Heritage Sites span Cappadocia’s rock-cut churches, Istanbul’s Byzantine and Ottoman monuments, Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Lycian ruins, and Lydian royal tombs — one of the densest archaeological landscapes on earth.
Iran holds 29 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, spanning Achaemenid ceremonial capitals, Bronze Age cities, living cave settlements, and two exceptional natural landscapes along the Caspian coast and in the arid south-east.
Portugal’s 17 UNESCO World Heritage Sites span prehistoric Palaeolithic rock art, Manueline monasteries, Atlantic island vineyards, and the only surviving laurel forest of its kind in the world.
Poland’s 17 UNESCO World Heritage Sites range from the medieval royal city of Kraków and a vast prehistoric flint mine to the last primeval lowland forest in Europe and a concentration camp that stands as a permanent warning.
The Czech Republic’s 17 UNESCO World Heritage Sites range from medieval royal towns and a Mies van der Rohe villa to a Baroque hop landscape and a fragment of Europe’s ancient beech forest — one of Central Europe’s most varied heritage lists.
South Korea’s 17 UNESCO World Heritage Sites span 8th-century Buddhist grottoes, living Confucian shrines, a fortress-capital, two natural sites, and a 2025 prehistoric petroglyph inscription along the Bangucheon Stream.
Russia holds 33 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, from the timber churches of Kizhi and the monasteries of the European north to Lake Baikal, the volcanoes of Kamchatka, and a newly inscribed Ice Age cave in the southern Urals.
The United States holds 26 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, from Yellowstone’s geothermal basin and the Grand Canyon’s layered geology to pre-Columbian earthwork cities and a 2024 Moravian settlement in Pennsylvania.
Brazil’s 25 UNESCO World Heritage Sites range from the Baroque hilltop towns of Minas Gerais and a landmark site of Atlantic slave memory to Amazonian reserves and a newly inscribed karst canyon with prehistoric rock art.
