MADRID: The sacred Buddhist mountain of Wutai in China and Italy’s Dolomite Mountains were among five new sites named yesterday to UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

The tidal flats and wetlands of the Wadden Sea in Germany and the Netherlands, Cape Verde’s 15th century town of Cidade Velha and Burkina Faso’s Loropeni ruins also became World Heritage Sites, UNESCO announced.

It also inscribed the Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park in the Philippines as an “extension” to the Tubbataha Reef Marine Park, which joined the World Heritage List in 1993.

The announcements were made on the fifth day of a meeting of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee in Seville, Spain.

The committee, which is meeting until June 30, is deciding which of 27 sites deserve to be added to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s heritage list of 881 sites that have “outstanding universal value.” UNESCO said Mount Wutai, a “sacred Buddhist mountain” in northern China that includes 53 monasteries, was named as a “cultural landscape.” It features “the Ming Dynasty Shuxiang Temple with a huge complex of 500 statues representing Buddhist stories woven into three dimensional pictures of mountains and water.

“Overall, the buildings on the site present a catalogue of the way Buddhist architecture developed and influenced palace building in China over more than one millennium.” The Dolomites in northern Italy comprise “a diversity of spectacular landscapes of international significance for geomorphology marked by steeples, pinnacles and rock walls,” UNESCO said in a statement.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which makes recommendations to the UNESCO committee, said the mountains were chosen for “their outstanding natural beauty and the geological significance of their limestone formations.” UNESCO said the Wadden Sea “is one of the last remaining natural, large-scale, intertidal ecosystems where natural processes continue to function largely undisturbed.

“It is home to numerous plant and animal species, including marine mammals such as the harbour seal, grey seal and harbour porpoise.” German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel welcomed the decision as “a great day for the protection of nature in Germany”.