The D-Day beaches in Normandy become a UNESCO World Heritage Site

The beaches of Normandy on which the Anglo-American allies landed on D-Day on 6 June 1944 have been inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. This was announced by the OU agency for cultural heritage.

This is the culmination of a project started almost 20 years ago, during a meeting of the United Nations agency in South Korea. Extending along just over 80 kilometers of coast between the departments of Manche and Calvados, in north-western France, the landing beaches of 6 June 1944 were the scene of a decisive battle to free Europe from Nazism and put an end to the Second World War.

These beaches are directly and materially associated with the landings (...) that played a decisive role in the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi occupation, a representative of UNESCO's International Council on Monuments and Sites (Icomos) recalled during the session in Busan, South Korea. This group of sites symbolically commemorates the immense human sacrifice made to overthrow a deeply entrenched authoritarian occupation in Europe, he continued.

The bid included the five Normandy landing beaches, known by the code names Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword, as well as Pointe du Hoc, the scene of decisive battles, the German artillery battery of Longues-sur-Mer and the artificial port of Arromanches-les-Bains, known as Port Mulberry, composed of enormous concrete caissons manufactured in England to facilitate Allied logistics. Numerous cemeteries and military monuments are associated with the site.