Spa towns want to submit their nomination for UNESCO in the second half of the year

Karlovy Vary - The spa towns of seven countries want to submit a nomination for the Famous Spas of Europe to the UNESCO World Heritage list in the second half of this year. The nomination documentation has currently passed a so-called completeness test. It will now be supplemented with some formal requirements and, after approval in all involved countries, it will be sent to Paris, said the mayor of Karlovy Vary, Petr Kulhánek (KOA), to reporters today.

"We originally wanted to submit the nomination by the end of January. However, due to the approval procedures in the seven participating countries, it is not feasible to meet the end of January deadline. As soon as it is supplemented and finalized, it will be submitted during the year 2018. Following this, the evaluation of the nomination will take place at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris," Kulhánek said. According to him, it is currently not possible to estimate how long the evaluation will take. It is unclear how UNESCO will respond to the serial nomination of 11 cities. If everything takes the standard time, a decision on the nomination should be made in 2020.

In the Karlovy Vary Region, the nomination concerns Karlovy Vary, Mariánské Lázně, and Františkovy Lázně. For this reason, the heritage protection in these towns has been unified and expanded. Now part of their heritage reserves is the so-called spa cultural landscape. "This refers to a network of spa paths, pavilions, lookouts, observation towers, memorials, benches, and crosses that are interwoven through the surrounding forests. This is the first time such a landscape has been included in a heritage reserve," said the deputy mayor Jiří Klsák (KOA).

In Mariánské Lázně and Karlovy Vary, heritage protection was previously in the form of a heritage zone, but the change to a reserve will not affect the owners of the affected properties. However, owners of houses newly included in the reserve will also need to have the approval of heritage officials for modifications to their properties. This concerns parts of Drahovice and Tuhnice in Karlovy Vary and two streets in Františkovy Lázně.

The final composition of the originally broader nomination is 11 European cities - Bad Ems, Bad Kissingen, Baden-Baden, Baden near Vienna, Bath, Františkovy Lázně, Karlovy Vary, Mariánské Lázně, Montecatini Terme, Spa, and Vichy. The nomination has been in preparation for more than ten years and, given the number of represented cities, is the most complicated nomination in Czech history.