Salt eyeing place on UNESCO World Heritage List

BALQA/AMMAN — The Salt Municipality has finished 90 per cent of its file that will be submitted for nomination to the UNESCO World Heritage List, Mayor Khaled Khushman said Tuesday.

Work on the nomination started in September 2014, he said, with the municipality involving a number of international experts in the process.

"We wanted to present the heritage value of the city, and now we have a number of Jordanian historians who are also working with us in this project," Khushman told The Jordan Times over the phone.

The mayor said there is a government commitment to preserve the heritage value of the city, which was the capital of Transjordan, adding that the municipality decided to choose 25 buildings that illustrate the "golden age" of the city between 1865 and 1920.

"The buildings are classified into five categories, including religious sites that show coexistence in the city, commercial buildings and residential venues," he added.

Khushman said the municipality has set a number of requirements for families who want to renovate their houses so that their heritage value will not be affected.

Giovanni Fontana Antonelli, who is consultant with both UNESCO and the municipality and is among the experts working on the nomination file, said the city needs to produce evidence of authentic, historical, architectural or heritage values.

"Therefore, I proposed to focus on a specific period that is known as the golden age of Salt, also referring to the yellow colour of the stone," he told The Jordan Times in a recent interview in the city.

Antonelli described the evolution of the houses as "interesting", with the homes of peasants transformed into residences and palaces of a new emerging class.

"We selected these buildings to show this evolution," he added.

Khushman said experts are expected to visit the city, some 35km northwest of Amman, to ensure the government's commitment towards preserving the heritage value of the city in the future.

Antonelli said the deadline to submit the nomination to the World Heritage List is February 1, 2016.

He added that Salt's nomination has been under consideration in Jordan for many years, with attempts to submit the file in 1994 and in 2004. 

"The two previous experiences were done through local experts. The first did not succeed and the second was not finalised and was not even submitted," Antonelli added.

Jordan’s Baptism Site was recently inscribed to UNESCO’s World Heritage List, to become the fifth site in the Kingdom included in the list after Petra, Quseir Amra, Um Al Rassas and Wadi Rum.