Terraced landscapes as protected cultural heritage sites

Abstract

This article presents the current state of protection of terraced landscapes as an important type of cultural landscape, both globally and in Slovenia. The UNESCO World Heritage List, the Satoyama Initiative list, and the Slovenian Register of Immovable Cultural Heritage are analyzed. The findings show that terraces rarely appear as a factor justifying protection, even though certain progress has been made in recent years. At least globally, this has clearly been contributed to by the 2010 adoption of the Honghe Declaration. Slovenia shows both a lack of appropriate criteria for identifying terraced landscapes worth protecting and an insufficiently systematic treatment of heritage sites that are already being protected.