Bahrain Fort is among 13 cultural gems that have been added to the UN list of World Heritage sites recently.

Of the new sites, seven are in Europe, three in the Gulf and Middle East region, two in Asia and one in Africa, according to officials attending a meeting of the Unesco World Heritage Committee in Durban, South Africa.
The new sites include the historic centre of Macau, France’s port city of Le Havre, the Plantin-Moretus museum in Belgium, a printing plant and publishing house in Antwerp dating from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, the historic centre of Yaroslavlin in Russia with its numerous 17th century churches and the Ottoman town of Gjirokastra in Albania. Also honoured were the city of Soltaniyeh in Iran and the Biblical Tells or pre-historic settlement mounds of Megiddo, Razor and Beer Sheba in Israel.
The Bahrain Fort, with its impressive Portuguese construction, covers a period of 4,000 years of archaeological data and may have been the first settlement in Dilmun history. The Unesco meetings were attended by Bahrain’s Culture and National Heritage assistant under-secretary Shaikha Mar hint Ibrahim Al Khalifa and Bahrain Museum director Abdul Rahman Mesameh.