Meteora in Greece and the town of Uberaba in Brazil, designated UNESCO Global Geoparks
Cairo: Mai Kamal El-Din
UNESCO has designated new sites, classified as UNESCO Global Geoparks, including the Normandie-Maine park, for France. Greece already has two classified sites, UNESCO Global Geoparks, one on the island of Lesvos and its fossilized forest, the other on the island of Ikaria. To these, has now been added the unique site of Meteora. In Brazil, the Uberaba site was chosen and after 13 years of work, the organizers of the bid were finally able to celebrate their victory.
To fully appreciate the uniqueness of Meteora, you have to imagine immense sandstone columns, which reach up to 300 meters in height, topped by six monasteries dating from the 12th and 16th centuries. The monks who live in these monasteries, which can be visited and recently flown over, call these columns the columns of heaven. They are a prayer that ascends to heaven. Several films have also been filmed in Meteora, including a James Bond.
The monks still use large baskets, a sort of rope basket, to go up and down from their monasteries, which contain unimaginable treasures of Byzantine art, including unique frescoes. Otherwise, there are hundreds of steps to climb, but once you reach the top, the view that covers the entire region makes you forget the fatigue and takes your breath away.
Meteora also contains geological wonders, the taffoni of Kalambaka, rock formations, hollowed out by millennia of alveolar erosion. Finally, in the western part of the Geopark, which is 2,409 square kilometers large, are the Pindos mountains, which constitute a refuge for animal and plant biodiversity.
The town hall of the Meteora region hopes that its integration into the Geoparks chain will breathe new life into local tourism, particularly ecotourism currently in vogue in Greece. The monks are satisfied to see their monasteries valued. Archaeologists hope that the integration of Meteora into the Geoparks chain will protect this monumental site from the initiatives of the Ministry of Culture, which aims for mass tourism exploitation of all archaeological sites, even if it means disfiguring them.
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