Nice, the Riviera’s UNESCO Winter Resort In 2021, UNESCO added Nice to the World Heritage list under the name “Nice, Winter Resort Town of the Riviera.” The listing is not about a single monument. It recognises the whole city as an example of how the climate itself became a tourist attraction, and how a genuine city was reshaped to receive wealthy winter visitors from across Europe. Understanding that story makes the seafront read very differently.

One architect, one free walking tour Ljubljana looks the way it does because of one man. Joze Plecnik (1872-1957), a Slovenian architect trained under Otto Wagner in Vienna, spent the interwar decades reshaping his home city into a walkable, human-scaled capital. In 2021 UNESCO inscribed his work here as “The works of Joze Plecnik in Ljubljana, human-centred urban design,” and the best part for a traveller is that almost every listed piece is a public street, bridge, or square you can see for free.

The good news for anyone watching their budget: most of what makes the Bay of Kotor a UNESCO site, officially the “Natural and Culturo-Historical Region of Kotor,” inscribed in 1979, costs nothing to look at. Walking the bay road, wandering Kotor’s Old Town streets, and photographing the water from any of the surrounding hills is free. The costs show up at specific gates, and knowing which ones matter keeps a Kotor day cheap.

Heads up: some links here are affiliate links. Book or buy through them and we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only point you to things we would actually use. Brasília isn’t a few UNESCO buildings, it’s one UNESCO city Brasília itself, not a single building or district inside it, is the UNESCO World Heritage Site: the official name on the list is simply “Brasilia,” inscribed in 1987 for the Plano Piloto urban plan and Oscar Niemeyer’s civic architecture built on it.