Heritage monitor center opens in compliance with UNESCO standards

The Cultural Affairs Bureau (IC) has formally opened the Macao World Heritage Monitoring Centre to comply with UNESCO and national standards on cultural heritage conservation.

Computerized mechanisms will be introduced to the centre for daily monitoring of the conditions of local cultural heritage.

At a previous Cultural Heritage Committee meeting, it was disclosed that the centre, which is located in an IC premises at No. 5-7, Rua de Sanches de Miranda, will monitor the conditions of the city’s 22 architectural structures and eight plazas.

Data will be collected from a wide range of sources, such as the weather bureau, the pollution bureau and the tourism bureau, to evaluate the temperature, humidity and tourist flow at the aforementioned sites.

Some members of the committee also suggested the use of the public surveillance system, administered by the police, for the supervision over cultural heritage sites.

Equipment was also installed at the sites to gather data.

In a statement released on the opening of the new centre, the IC said: “monitoring is an important means to understand the overall protection and management status of the city’s World Heritage sites, helping to track the trend of changes to certain elements with the passage of time, being therefore an important requirement in the international World Heritage Convention and a crucial topic in China’s protection efforts for each heritage site.”

Works on establishing the centre commenced in 2019, the IC revealed. The premises is housed within a building that was once the headquarters of the anti-corruption commission prior to 1999.

The IC announced that, by formulating a monitoring plan for the Historic Centre of Macao that meets the needs of heritage protection, IC has standardized various technical specifications for heritage data collection for the further systematic and automatic monitoring of the World Heritage sites.