2025's UNESCO World Heritage Sites List: Fairy-Tale Castles, Lost Cities, and Natural Wonders

The 26 cultural and natural sites UNESCO just added to its World Heritage List

Published: Jul 23, 2025

Updated: Jul 23, 2025

Neuschwantstein Castle in Schwangau, Germany

SCStock / Shutterstock

A onetime hub for real-life pirates of the Caribbean and the real-life inspiration for Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland are among the places newly inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. They join two dozen other new honorees that don't correspond to any theme park attractions we can think of.

The World Heritage Committee met earlier this month in Paris to decide which cultural and natural properties to add to its running tally of sites considered "of outstanding value to humanity."

A project of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (that's what UNESCO stands for), the World Heritage List got going in 1978 and now covers 1,248 properties.

As NPR explains, "Countries with World Heritage sites must commit to preserving them; countries with designated sites could also receive funding to help with that conservation."

One country that won't be helping UNESCO fulfill its mission, effective December 2026: the United States. The Trump administration said this week it's quitting the organization by that deadline because UNESCO supports "divisive social and cultural causes and maintains an outsized focus on the UN’s sustainable development goals, a globalist, ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy."

Since the U.S. funds about 8% of UNESCO's budget, the country's withdrawal from the body amounts to a financial blow. But it's important to remember this is the third time the U.S. has pulled out of UNESCO, having previously quit under Reagan and the first Trump administration. UNESCO survived those chapters and was already "braced" for another departure under Trump 2.0, according to the Guardian.

In any case, we've got ourselves a new set of World Heritage Sites.

For travelers, the annual announcement of newly inscribed locations supplies a good reason to review and maybe update your own list of places you'd like to visit in person. Unless, of course, you're troubled by the notion of a "globalist" vacation, in which case maybe you can spend all your time off at Mar-a-Lago.

Among the standouts from the class of 2025:

• The four grand palaces built under King Ludwig II in the Bavarian Alps of Germany went up between 1864 and 1886. Ludwig's over-the-top artistic vision drew on German fairy tales, Wagnerian opera, and other European palaces. The castles have been open to the public since shortly after the king's death in 1886. One of them, Neuschwanstein (pictured at the top of this page), reportedly inspired Walt Disney to use the edifice as the model for Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland.

• In southeastern Jamaica, the 17th-century remains of Port Royal, some of which are now underwater, offer a well-preserved glimpse of what was a thriving British colonial city—and capital of Caribbean piracy—until a devastating earthquake buried much of the place under sand and sea in 1692.

• As part of a concerted effort to help preserve more African sites, two countries on that continent have gotten their very first World Heritage properties this year. In Guinea-Bissau, the Bijagós Archipelago on the Atlantic coast has been recognized for its "rich biodiversity" encompassing mangroves, mudflats, and other ecosystems inhabited by endangered turtles, manatees, dolphins, and over 870,000 shorebirds.

• And in Sierra Leone, the Gola Rainforest National Park and the Tiwai Island Wildlife Sanctuary got the nod for the "high conservation value" of habitats for "key species like the African Forest Elephant and Pygmy Hippopotamus."

• Nearly a third of the sites inscribed this year are linked to prehistory, the World Heritage Committee points out in a press release. Those places include the striking caves of Brazil's Peruaçu River Canyon; a dense concentration of stone megaliths in Brittany, France; and a series of petroglyphs, dating from 5,000 BCE to the 9th century, along the Bangucheon Stream in South Korea.

• Finally, three memorial sites in Cambodia were chosen to honor the victims of human rights abuses by the Khmer Rouge regime from 1971 to 1979. Once centers of repression and violence, the museums and memorials now occupying the properties have become "places of peace and reflection."