Ethiopia: Aksum

The ruins of the ancient city of Aksum are found close to Ethiopia's northern border. They mark the location of the heart of ancient Ethiopia, when the Kingdom of Aksum was the most powerful state between the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia. The massive ruins, dating from between the 1st and the 13th century A.D., include monolithic obelisks, giant stelae, royal tombs and the ruins of ancient castles. Long after its political decline in the 10th century, Ethiopian emperors continued to be crowned in Aksum.

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Nigeria: Sukur Cultural Landscape

The Sukur Cultural Landscape, with the Palace of the Hidi (Chief) on a hill dominating the villages below, the terraced fields and their sacred symbols, and the extensive remains of a former flourishing iron industry, is a remarkably intact physical expression of a society and its spiritual and material culture.

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Nigeria: Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove

The dense forest of the Osun Sacred Grove, on the outskirts of the city of Osogbo, is one of the last remnants of primary high forest in southern Nigeria. Regarded as the abode of the goddess of fertility Osun, one of the pantheon of Yoruba gods, the landscape of the grove and its meandering river is dotted with sanctuaries and shrines, sculptures and art works in honour of Osun and other deities. The sacred grove, which is now seen as a symbol of identity for all Yoruba people, is probably the last in Yoruba culture. It testifies to the once widespread practice of establishing sacred groves outside all settlements.

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Tunisia: Village de Sidi Bou Saïd : Harmonie architecturale et spirituelle en Méditerranée - tentative

The nominated property is the village of Sidi Bou Said, a coastal village on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, located on a promontory overlooking Carthage and the Gulf of Tunis and offering panoramic views of Cape Bon (Promontory of Mercury) and the islands of Zembra and Zembretta (the Aegimures) to the northeast, and Cape Sidi Ali Mekki (Promontory of Apollo) to the north. Located about twenty kilometers northeast of the city of Tunis, the village, named after the Sufi saint Abou Said Khalaf Ibn Yahya El Tamimi El Beji, developed from the 18th century . Religious monuments, palaces, emblematic public spaces, a network of public fountains and cemeteries form an architectural ensemble of a very diverse range of styles and influences that have succeeded one another over time in Tunisia and up to the present day.

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South Africa: Robben Island

Robben Island was used at various times between the 17th and 20th centuries as a prison, a hospital for socially unacceptable groups and a military base. Its buildings, particularly those of the late 20th century such as the maximum security prison for political prisoners, witness the triumph of democracy and freedom over oppression and racism.

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Tunisia: Djerba: Testimony to a settlement pattern in an island territory

This serial property is a testimony to a settlement pattern that developed on the island of Djerba around the 9th century CE amidst the semi-dry and water-scarce environment. Low‑density was its key characteristic: it involved the division of the island into neighbourhoods, clustered together, that were economically self-sustainable, connected to each other and to the religious and trading places of the island, through a complex network of roads. Resulting from a mixture of environmental, socio-cultural and economic factors, the distinctive human settlement of Djerba demonstrates the way local people adapted their lifestyle to the conditions of their water-scarce natural environment.

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Togo: Series of attics from the Nok, Mamproug, Kouba and Bagou caves

High cliffs, whose walls face north, dominate the savannah of this northern part of Togo with their sheer drop. They are the last high reliefs before this immense expanse of savannah that extends into Burkina. This formation, commonly called Boumbouaka sandstone, presents cliff escarpments of Upper Proterozoic age of rare beauty with at the base an alternation of pellites (argillites) and psammites, the whole resting on a crystalline base dating from the Birrimian. Horizontal crevices open up in the last upper quarter of their height; difficult to access, they served as shelter and refuge for the indigenous populations during the periods of various insecurities that raged in the region from the 17th to the 19th century.

These caves contain granaries carved in the same traditional architectural style from local materials (stones, clay and straw). Cylindrical, oblong or semi-spherical in shape, they open upwards, their height is generally two and a half meters, their diameter three meters.

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Tunisia: Kairouan

Founded in 670, KairouanKairouan flourished under the Aghlabid dynasty in the 9th century. Despite the transfer of the political capital to Tunis in the 12th century, Kairouan remained the Maghreb's principal holy city. Its rich architectural heritage includes the Great Mosque, with its marble and porphyry columns, and the 9th-century Mosque of the Three Gates.

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Kenya: Fort Jesus, Mombasa

The FortFort, built by the Portuguese in 1593-1596 to the designs of Giovanni Battista Cairati to protect the port of Mombasa, is one of the most outstanding and well preserved examples of 16th Portuguese military fortification and a landmark in the history of this type of construction. The Fort's layout and form reflected the Renaissance ideal that perfect proportions and geometric harmony are to be found in the human body. The property covers an area of 2.36 hectares and includes the fort's moat and immediate surroundings.

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Algeria: Tipasa

On the shores of the Mediterranean, Tipasa was an ancient Punic trading-post conquered by Rome and turned into a strategic base for the conquest of the kingdoms of Mauritania. It comprises a unique group of Phoenician, Roman, palaeochristian and Byzantine ruins alongside indigenous monuments such as the Kbor er Roumia, the great royal mausoleum of Mauretania.

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Gambia: Stone Circles of Senegambia

The site consists of four large groups of stone circles that represent an extraordinary concentration of over 1,000 monuments in a band 100 km wide along some 350 km of the River Gambia. The four groups, Sine Ngayène, Wanar, Wassu and Kerbatch, cover 93 stone circles and numerous tumuli, burial mounds, some of which have been excavated to reveal material that suggest dates between 3rd century BC and 16th century AD. Together the stone circles of laterite pillars and their associated burial mounds present a vast sacred landscape created over more than 1,500 years. It reflects a prosperous, highly organized and lasting society.

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Morocco: Rabat, Modern Capital and Historic City: a Shared Heritage

Located on the Atlantic coast in the north-west of Morocco, the site is the product of a fertile exchange between the Arabo-Muslim past and Western modernism. The inscribed city encompasses the new town conceived and built under the French Protectorate from 1912 to the 1930s, including royal and administrative areas, residential and commercial developments and the Jardins d’Essais botanical and pleasure gardens. It also encompasses older parts of the city dating back to the 12thcentury. The new town is one of the largest and most ambitious modern urban projects built in Africa in the 20th century and probably the most complete. The older parts include Hassan Mosque (begun in 1184) and the Almohad ramparts and gates, the only surviving parts of the project for a great capital city of the Almohad caliphate as well as remains from the Moorish, or Andalusian, principality of the 17th century.

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Mali: Timbuktu

Home of the prestigious Koranic Sankore University and other madrasas, Timbuktu was an intellectual and spiritual capital and a centre for the propagation of Islam throughout Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries. Its three great mosques, Djingareyber, Sankore and Sidi Yahia, recall Timbuktu's golden age. Although continuously restored, these monuments are today under threat from desertification.

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Ethiopia: Harar Jugol, the Fortified Historic Town

The fortified historic town of Harar is located in the eastern part of the country on a plateau with deep gorges surrounded by deserts and savannah. The walls surrounding this sacred Muslim city were built between the 13th and 16th centuries. Harar Jugol, said to be the fourth holiest city of Islam, numbers 82 mosques, three of which date from the 10th century, and 102 shrines, but the townhouses with their exceptional interior design constitute the most spectacular part of Harar's cultural heritage. The impact of African and Islamic traditions on the development of the town's building types and urban layout make for its particular character and uniqueness.

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Tomb of Aw Ansar

Mauritania: Ancient Ksour of Ouadane, Chinguetti, Tichitt and Oualata

Founded in the 11th and 12th centuries to serve the caravans crossing the Sahara, these trading and religious centres became focal points of Islamic culture. They have managed to preserve an urban fabric that evolved between the 12th and 16th centuries. Typically, houses with patios crowd along narrow streets around a mosque with a square minaret. They illustrate a traditional way of life centred on the nomadic culture of the people of the western Sahara.

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Oualata

Algeria: Timgad

Timgad lies on the northern slopes of the Aurès mountains and was created ex nihilo as a military colony by the Emperor Trajan in AD 100. With its square enclosure and orthogonal design based on the cardo and decumanus, the two perpendicular routes running through the city, it is an excellent example of Roman town planning.

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Cameroon: Sangha Trinational

Situated in the north-western Congo Basin, where Cameroon, Central African Republic and Congo meet, the site encompasses three contiguous national parks totalling around 750,000 ha. Much of the site is unaffected by human activity and features a wide range of humid tropical forest ecosystems with rich flora and fauna, including Nile crocodiles and goliath tigerfish, a large predator. Forest clearings support herbaceous species and Sangha is home to considerable populations of forest elephants, critically endangered western lowland gorilla, and endangered chimpanzee. The site’s environment has preserved the continuation of ecological and evolutionary processes on a huge scale and great biodiversity, including many endangered animal species.

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Cameroon: Dja Faunal Reserve

This is one of the largest and best-protected rainforests in Africa, with 90% of its area left undisturbed. Almost completely surrounded by the Dja River, which forms a natural boundary, the reserve is especially noted for its biodiversity and a wide variety of primates. It contains 107 mammal species, five of which are threatened.

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South Africa: Early Farmsteads of the Cape Winelands (tentative)

The Cape Winelands is situated in the extreme south-western corner of the African continent in the immediate vicinity of Cape Town, the capital of the Western Cape Province, one of nine provinces of the Republic of South Africa.

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South Africa: Maloti-Drakensberg Park

The Maloti-Drakensberg Park is a transnational property composed of the uKhahlamba Drakensberg National Park in South Africa and the Sehlathebe National Park in Lesotho. The site has exceptional natural beauty in its soaring basaltic buttresses, incisive dramatic cutbacks, and golden sandstone ramparts as well as visually spectacular sculptured arches, caves, cliffs, pillars and rock pools. The site's diversity of habitats protects a high level of endemic and globally important plants. The site harbors endangered species such as the Cape vulture (Gyps coprotheres) and the bearded vulture (Gypaetus barbatus). Lesotho’s Sehlabathebe National Park also harbors the Maloti minnow (Pseudobarbus quathlambae), a critically endangered fish species only found in this park. This spectacular natural site contains many caves and rock-shelters with the largest and most concentrated group of paintings in Africa south of the Sahara. They represent the spiritual life of the San people, who lived in this area over a period of 4,000 years.

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