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Government's ignorance and lack of vision, says party
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The Government have announced, with much fanfare, that Gorham’s Cave has been included on the British tentative list to UNESCO. Being placed on this list will allow an application to be made for UNESCO World Heritage Status for Gorham’s Cave. The British list will now not be reviewed again till 2021.
In making the announcement the Minister for Culture, Edwin Reyes, gave a remarkable interview which was either ignorant of the history of this issue or a deliberate distortion of the facts, says the PDP. The Minister said among other things that the inclusion of Gorham’s Cave on the British list is “worldwide recognition of Gibraltar’s commitment to heritage” that it “was a very big step to get ourselves onto the tentative list” and that as it was “not easy to get onto the list [the Government] …took a gamble and decided to pinpoint a particular location [Gorham’s Cave].”
All of this is a monument to the Minister’s ignorance on this issue or his desire to sound upbeat in the face of what he must know is a completely different reality.
The party added: Of course it is not easy to get onto the tentative list but all the hard work had been done already. Fortress Gibraltar – a much more ambitious project – had already been accepted onto the last British list in 1999.1 What has happened now is hardly a cause for celebration or as the Minister put it a “recognition of Gibraltar’s commitment to heritage.” What has happened is simply a massive reduction in the aspirations of the Government. The Government has abandoned the wider bid and replaced it with a tiny part of it and is pretending that that is an achievement. It is short-sighted and the reverse of an achievement. The Minister also said that this would be used as a pilot project to then put forward other locations in Gibraltar for World Heritage Status. Not even that is true.
It is not possible to put forward other locations in Gibraltar for UNESCO World Heritage Status unless they are on the British list and this will not be reviewed till 2021.
The stark reality is that what was achieved in 1999 has been unceremoniously dumped by the Government and cannot be recovered till 2021 at the earliest.
Any attempt to get a more ambitious “worldwide recognition” of our wider heritage [which had in principle been accepted by Britain in 1999] has been put back 20 years. This will also detrimentally affect the efforts to boost our tourist product since Gorham’s Cave cannot be a tourist attraction due to its inaccessibility and ongoing research works being undertaken.
If the accolade of getting the more ambitious Fortress Gibraltar project listed as World Heritage had been pursued it would have assisted in the marketing of Gibraltar as a centre for eco-tourism.
This simply shows lack of vision by the Government. The Minister should certainly not attempt to sell to the public that this is an achievement. It is nothing of the kind, they said.
01-04-11
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