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Historic Fortified Town of Campeche
| Site number: | 895 |
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| Type of site: | Cultural | |
| Date: | - | |
| Date of Inscription: | 1999 | |
| Location: | North America, Mexico, State of Campeche | |
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| Description: | Campeche is perfectly representative of a New World’s harbour town from the Spanish colonial period. The historic centre has retained its outer walls and fortification system to this day, they were originally designed to shield this Caribbean port from attacks coming from the direction of the sea. --WHMNet paraphrase from the description at WHC Site, where additional information is available. | |
| Campeche is a city and municipality of Mexico located at 19.85° N 90.53° W, on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico. The city's population at the 2005 census was 211,671 people. The municipality for which it serves as municipal seat had a population of 238,850. The city was founded in 1540 by Spanish conquistadores as San Francisco de Campeche atop the pre-existing Maya city of Canpech or Kimpech. The Pre-Columbian city was described as having 3,000 houses and various monuments, of which little trace remains. The city retains many of the old colonial Spanish city walls and fortifications which protected the city (not always successfully) from pirates and buccaneers. The state of preservation and quality of its architecture earned it the status of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999. Originally, the Spaniards lived inside the walled city, while the natives lived in the surrounding barrios of San Francisco, Guadalupe and San Román. These barrios still retain their original churches. --Wikipedia. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. | ||
| Source: | http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/895 | |
| Source2: | http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/895/video | |
| Reference: | 1. UNESCO World Heritage Center, Site Page. | |