cultural landscape

A cultural landscape, as defined by the World Heritage Committee, is the “cultural properties [that] represent the combined works of nature and of man.” The World Heritage Committee identifies three categories of cultural landscape, ranging from (i) those landscapes most deliberately ‘shaped’ by people, through (ii) full range of ‘combined’ works, to (iii) those least evidently ‘shaped’ by people (yet highly valued). The three categories extracted from the Committee’s Operational Guidelines, are as follows: “a landscape designed and created intentionally by man” an “organically evolved landscape” which may be a “relict (or fossil) landscape” or a “continuing landscape” an “associative cultural landscape” which may be valued because of the “religious, artistic or cultural associations of the natural element”