UNESCO adds Marquesas Islands to world heritage list

The Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia have been added to the World Heritage classification, UN cultural body UNESCO said Friday.

"New inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List: Te Henua Enata - The Marquesas Islands," the organisation posted on X, using the archipelago's indigenous name meaning "The Land of Men".

The decision was one of several announced Friday as UNESCO's World Heritage Committee meets in New Delhi.

Located in the Pacific around 5,500 miles northeast of New Zealand, the Marquesas offer "exceptional testimony" of "a human civilisation that arrived by sea around the year 1000 CE and developed on these isolated islands between the 10th and the 19th Centuries," UNESCO said on its website.

But they are seen by the cultural body as a mixed site equally precious as "a hotspot of biodiversity that combines irreplaceable and exceptionally well conserved marine and terrestrial ecosystems".

The islands host "rare and diverse flora, a diversity of emblematic marine species, and one of the most diverse seabird assemblages in the South Pacific," with waters "virtually free from human exploitation", UNESCO added.