Soviet Gulags – 30,000 forced labour camps operated between the 1920s and 1950s. The author Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent three years of an eight-year internment at Ekibastuz in northeastern Kazakhstan. Russia’s Unesco sites are mainly natural, religious and industrial wonders.
San Salvador Island, Bahamas – formerly Watling’s Island, this is reputed to be the first land spotted by Columbus on 12 October 1492. At the time the natives called it Guanahaní. Columbus possibly made landfall at Plana Cays. The Bahamas has no inscribed Unesco World Heritage Sites; lighthouses and a national park appear on the tentative list.
Devil’s Island, French Guiana – the French penal colony that operated for 100 years, from 1852 to 1952. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was imprisoned here for five years after being found guilty of high treason; he was absolved in 1906.
Tower of Silence, Mumbai – a 300-year-old dakhma or funerary tower in a forest on Malabar Hill, where the bodies of deceased Zoroastrians are placed and exposed to scavenger birds.
Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota – site of the massacre of 300 Lakota people by the US Army on 29 December 1890. When Europeans arrived in the Americas, historians estimate there were over 10 million Native Americans. By 1900, their estimated population was under 300,000. Unesco inscribed eight indigenous ceremonial earthworks in Ohio at the 45th convention.
Pendle Hill, Lancashire – deeply associated with the 1612 Lancashire witch trials. Neither Pendle Hill nor Salem in Massachusetts are Unesco sites.
Cape Coast Castle, Ghana – one of around 40 “slave castles” built by European traders on the coast of West Africa; visited by Barack and Michelle Obama in 2009. A Unesco site since 1979.
By Chris Moss