The Cultural Heritage of Farming Country (14/21)

The Cultural Heritage of Farming Country (14/21)

A Viennese coffee house, designated since last year as an intangible cultural heritage, serves as the starting point for Dieter Moor's journey to those world heritage sites that revolve around eating, drinking and enjoying life and which - perhaps surprisingly - can also be summarised under the term "farming country". After all, a culture
is also expressed through its farming methods, so it is quite logical that UNESCO would name such places as part of our world's cultural heritage. Five o'clock tea was so important to the English that they even built a railroad in their colony in India to transport their beloved Darjeeling from the foothills of the Himalayas. The "Valle de Vinales" lies about 200 kilometres south west of Havana. It is said that the best tobacco in the world is grown here thanks to its ideal climatic conditions. In 2006, UNESCO named the agave landscape and production locations in and around the town of Tequila in Mexico as a world cultural heritage site. Most of the 35,000 residents make their living in some form from the spirit. The Lavaux on Lake Geneva is one of the most beautiful landscapes in Switzerland and is tailor-made for white wine, in particular Chasselas-Gutedel - one of the oldest grape varieties in the world. Saint Emillion in the southern French region of Bordeaux lies at the heart of the largest wine-growing area in the world. Wine-growing has a history here going back more than a thousand years. Traditionally, the grapes here are picked by hand. Like densely woven carpets, paddy fields cover the mountain slopes of the island of Luzon in the north of the Philippines. The rice terraces of Ifugao are a unique cultural landscape and a masterpiece of irrigation technology and terrace architecture. In 1995, this landscape was the first "farming landscape" to be designated a world cultural heritage.