Heritage of Humanity, World Heritage and Common Heritage: Concepts in Perspective

The adjectives are many and varied, but they express the same idea: the fact that there is something that transcends human cultural diversity and plurality andtherefore deserves to be highlighted and safeguarded as a Common Heritage of Humanity. It is from this understanding that the idea of World Heritage of Humanity is born, which over time will be reconfigured and bifurcated as World Heritage and Heritage of Humanity, respecting their definitions and differences, the first focusing on the materiality of heritage and the second linked to immateriality; the evolution of the concept of heritage for all people in the world has built, over these five decades, a series of understandings that brought visibility to this topic. In this text, we will discuss how the concept of World Heritage has become an expensive and rare article brand. At the same time as it became an end, it became a means to acquire more visibility, recognition and tourist presence. There is a popular consensus on the idea that a World Heritage Site is valuable because it has been approved by an organisation with international credibility such as UNESCO. But what are the side effects of this approval?