The Alto Douro wine region 10 years after its inscription in UNESCO

Abstract

The Alto Douro Wine Region, with an area of 24,600 ha, has been inscribed since 2001 in the List of World Heritage Sites as an evolutive and living cultural landscape, lying along the river Douro and its tributaries, with many deep valleys and steep slopes. The inscription gave the Alto Douro Wine Region the status of a National Monument. It included the cultural landscape in a national regulatory context specific to the protection of properties to be articulated with the Douro’s pioneering role on a worldwide scale where a regulatory framework of vitivinicultural activity has built over a continuous period of 250 years. The most significant transformation in the Alto Douro Wine Region in the last 10 years was the introduction of new land organisation systems for planting vines.

The main purpose of this article is to present some of the results of the assessment on the state of conservation of the Alto Douro Wine Region in 2012 in terms of Authenticity and Integrity with reference to its 2001 inscription date and adopting the methodology of the Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention (UNESCO, 2011). The results of the assessment indicate that despite certain environmental and landscape intrusions the Authenticity of the property prevails and that the search continues for sustainable solutions in response to difficult technical, economic and social conditions. Furthermore, the composition and functional organisation of the site needed to maintain the Integrity of the property still prevails.