Unesco World Heritage: Wales' slate landscape bid for honour

An area famed for its slate industry could join Egypt's Pyramids, India's Taj Mahal and Australia's Great Barrier Reef as a Unesco World Heritage site.

The slate landscape of north-west Wales is the UK's bid when the World Heritage Committee meet in China this weekend.

They will review cultural and natural bids from across the world, with an announcement in the coming days.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has backed the Welsh slate bid as it aims to be the UK's 33rd World Heritage site.

He said it was "an area of remarkable uniqueness and breath-taking beauty".

The area of Snowdonia, which runs throughout the county of Gwynedd, is up against nominations including the porticoes of Bologna in Italy, the city of Nice on the French Riviera and the Ribeira Sacra region of Spain, which was made famous by wine.

The slate landscape of north-west Wales was announced by the UK government as a World Heritage Site nomination in 2018.

It is said to have "roofed the 19th Century world" as slate from its quarries was exported around the globe.

Slate has been quarried in north Wales for more than 1,800 years but during the Industrial Revolution demand surged as cities across the UK expanded with slate being widely used to roof workers' homes and factories.

The landscape became the world leader for the production and export of slate during the 18th Century and, by the 1890s, the Welsh slate industry employed approximately 17,000 people and produced 485,000 tonnes of slate a year.

The industry had a huge impact on global architecture, with Welsh slate used on a number of buildings and palaces across the globe, including Westminster Hall, the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne and Copenhagen City Hall in Denmark.

"The slate industry is an iconic feature of north Wales, and of the Welsh nation as a whole, and has been of overwhelming importance in shaping our social and economic landscape," said industrial archaeologist Dr David Gwyn, who is part of the bid team.

"It was not only slate that was exported. Gwynedd slate quarries also exported people, skills, knowledge and technology around the world, and in turn, learned from them and their industries.

"The narrow-gauge railways were a crucial part of the slate industry and their designs and engineering were copied worldwide."

The UK bid says, as well as the international demand for Welsh slate, between 1780 and 1940 the area of Gwynedd was also home to a number of "ingenious developments in quarrying and stone processing" and was a world leader in mountain railways.

The council-led bid includes six sites within the county of Gwynedd and Snowdonia National Park.

"The landscape of today has been transformed on a monumental scale due to hundreds of years of mining in the area," the UK government bid said.

"The nomination to Unesco reflects this and the international significance of Welsh slate in 'roofing the 19th Century world'.

Liverpool hit the headlines last week after it was stripped of its World Heritage status after a UN committee found developments threatened the value of the city's waterfront.

The UK has 32 remaining World Heritage sites including Stonehenge, the Tower of London, Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey, The Lake District, Maritime Greenwich and Hadrian's Wall.

Wales has three World Heritage sites and one of those, like the slate landscape which is bidding for the status, is also in the north-west.

The castles and town walls of King Edward in Gwynedd was among the first sites in the UK to join the list when it was inscribed in 1986 alongside Stonehenge, Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire and Durham Castle and cathedral.

Unesco said the four castles of Beaumaris, Conwy, Caernarfon, Harlech and the attendant fortified towns at Conwy and Caernarfon "are the finest examples of late 13th Century and early 14th Century military architecture in Europe".

Wales' other Unesco sites are the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct - the highest canal aqueduct in the world - which spans the River Dee in Wrexham county and Blaenavon industrial landscape in Torfaen.

There are 1,121 historical significant sites in 167 countries across the world that been inscribed on the list.

Machu Picchu in South America, the Grand Canyon in the United States of America and the Great Wall of China and the Galapagos Islands are among those on the list.