Experts say tourist overuse threatens Peru's Machu Picchu by Radka Konkolova

This week in Quebec City, Canada the world UNESCO committee meeting takes place. Officials negotiate there which world monuments and heritage sites should be added to the list of UNESCO and which ones from already included should be added to the list of endangered heritage sites. They can surely choose from many suggestions from different parts of the whole world, even Slovakia tries to have two another monuments put down on this list. I am really curious whether it is going to become true. Anyway, this special listing has included 851 different monuments and places from about 150 countries all over the world. I think every government and probably citizens of given country too who have something special in their countries made either by nature or handmade, want to show it to the whole world and also want to protect it. In my opinion, monuments and heritage sites registered in the UNESCO list are more attractive and mean a large temptation for tourists. So this means quite high profits to the treasury but on the other hand, the place can be more and more damaged thanks to huge number of curious visitors. One point of this week meeting is bargaining about Peru's the most visited place, ancient citadel of Machu Picchu. This heritage site is registered in UNESCO list from 1983 and during the last ten years the yearly visits there more than doubled to 800,000 visitors per year. So some architects, archaeologists and residents are afraid it will be completely damaged if it is not on the list of endangered world heritage sites. Also the residents of nearby city of Cuzco, which is also the part of the listing protested against the state plan which supports expanding private development in the town and near it. So there are different opinions about the future of this citadel and its surrounding. The park officials want to improve Aguas Calientes, town in the neighbourhood of Machu Picchu, by expanding and building new hotels, restaurants and so on. At the same time they claim while there is possibility of spreading this town, the citadel will stay intact. According to my opinion, inhabitants don't want to have so many visitors in their environs who can sometimes in the future destroy their heritage and cultural monument they are proud of it...

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap_travel/20080701/ap_tr_ge/travel_brief_machu_picchu_endangered;_ylt=AmHt2ibqGMmMuvje15ytKB.s0NUE

by Radka Konkolova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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posted by Lucia Adamova