Müngsten Bridge on the way to becoming a Unesco World Heritage Site

Nomination - Müngsten Bridge on the way to becoming a Unesco World Heritage Site

The Müngsten Bridge between Solingen and Remscheid will be on the next German list of proposals for nomination as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Conference of Culture Ministers has decided to include the "prime example of European engineering" on the next tentative list, the Ministry of Construction announced in Düsseldorf on Monday.

"As the highest steel railroad bridge in Germany, it has connected the cities of Solingen and Remscheid across the Wupper valley since 1897," said Construction Minister Ina Scharrenbach (CDU). The inclusion of the application is a milestone on the way to North Rhine-Westphalia's seventh World Heritage Site. A total of seven sites from several federal states were added to the German Tentative List, including the Oympiapark in Munich.

The application "European large arch bridges of the 19th century" is about the 107-metre-high Müngsten Bridge and five other large arch bridges of the 19th century in Italy, France and Portugal. The mayors of the Bergisch municipalities of Solingen, Remscheid and Wuppertal reacted to the development with friends. Werner Lübberink, Deutsche Bahn's Group Representative in North Rhine-Westphalia, said: "It fills us with great pride as a Group to possibly own a World Heritage Site in the future".

The list is to be submitted to Unesco in 2024. However, it will still be a few years before the site is possibly included. The nomination will have to go through a review process. A decision on inscription on the World Heritage List is currently expected in 2033, the ministry said.

In 2012, a first attempt to nominate the Müngsten Bridge for the World Heritage List failed. At the time, experts advised that the monumental steel structure should be nominated together with other comparable technical structures in Europe.

Communication

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1. The Müngsten Bridge, located between Solingen and Remscheid, has been nominated for inclusion on Germany's list of proposals for Unesco World Cultural Heritage.
2. The bridge, a prime example of European engineering, spans the Wupper valley and has connected the cities since 1897.
3. The bridge, along with six other notable bridges from Europe, is part of the application titled "European large arch bridges of the 19th century" submitted to Unesco.
4. The CDU's Construction Minister Ina Scharrenbach considered the inclusion of the bridge in the tentative list a significant milestone on the way to achieving North Rhine-Westphalia's seventh Unesco World Heritage Site.
5. The decision to nominate the Müngsten Bridge was made at the Conference of Culture Ministers held in Düsseldorf.
6. Deutsche Bahn, the railway company in North Rhine-Westphalia, expressed great pride at the possibility of owning a World Heritage Site.
7. Previously in 2012, an attempt to nominate the Müngsten Bridge for the Unesco World Heritage List had failed, with experts advising that it should be nominated alongside other similar European structures.

Source: www.stern.de