The Taj Mahal in the Northern Indian city of Agra gleams dazzlingly white. The great Mughal emperor Shah Jahan had the marble tomb built in the seventeenth century for his third and favourite wife, who died giving birth to her fourteenth child. With its four minarets, the luminously beautiful Taj Mahal was to reach up to  the sky so that it could escort the emperor’s wife, Mumtaz Mahal, to heaven. The love story behind this monument has always fired the imagination. architecturally, the Taj Mahal is exceptional because it represents a peak in Islamic architecture in which traditional Persian and Hindu elements are also incorporated: the so-called Mughal style. For these reasons the Taj Mahal was put on Unesco’s World Heritage List in 1983 and is one of the most popular buildings on the list among tourists.

The Unesco list includes cultural and natural heritage that is considered unique, irreplaceable and the property of the whole world. In mid-2008 the list included 878 properties. Examples of world heritage sites can be found on all continents. Tsodilo, a desert area with thousands of rock paintings in Botswana, Africa, was added to the list because of its religious and spiritual significance for local peoples and its unique tale of human settlement over several millennia. Another example is Machu Picchu, the Inca city built high up in the mountains of Peru in the fifteenth century. Because of its concealed location it escaped being plundered by the Spanish colonizers. It is thus a unique relic of the sophisticated Inca civilization.

The Netherlands also contains world heritage. The Defence Line of Amsterdam, for example, or the former island of Schokland, the windmills at Kinderdijk and the Beemster Polder. Many Dutch heritage properties are linked with the battle against and management of water. At a time of globalization it is particularly important to cherish the historical and cultural diversity on earth. Unesco keeps a blacklist of threatened world heritage properties. Especially in developing countries it is not always possible to give enough attention to the protection of cultural heritage. A great deal of attention is focused on it nowadays within development cooperation. The groundwork for this was done by Prince Claus, among others. He considered culture to be a determinant for the self-awareness of a people and therefore also for development. The Prince Claus Fund acts in his spirit for the protection of cultural wealth throughout the world.