Reconsidering Quarter Century Experience of Cultural Landscape in UNESCO World Heritage Center

Despite the passing of more than a century from the first use of the term "cultural landscape," The World Heritage Center became the first international legal instrument to recognize and to protect cultural landscapes at the sixteenth session of the UNESCO in 1992. Investigating the interplay between people and nature over time in order to strengthen and protect them, and the recognition of the diversity of cultural landscapes, is an effective way of recording these valuable works. This paper examines the concept of cultural landscape and its criteria in the documents published by the World Heritage Center, examining the meetings held and the evolution of the concept and examining the diversity of human and environmental interactions between 1992 and 2017.The present study is descriptive-analytic. In this research, the documents of the UNESCO and related articles and books have been reviewed and its evolution has been investigated.Changing criteria for inscribing cultural landscapes, adopting cultural landscape categories and revising expert meetings are findings of this research. For example, in the section of regional meetings, cultural landscapes of various continents are explored or in the thematic section, the cultural landscape of routs, mountains, deserts, plantation systems, rice terraces have been considered. The World Heritage Convention recognize and to protect cultural landscapes of outstanding universal value. This opened the Convention to regions underrepresented on the World Heritage List and gave new drive to the interpretation of heritage.The inscription of properties in the six defined areas is not appropriate, and the European region accounts for about 50% of the properties.