Françoise Nyssen, Minister of Culture, announces the candidacy of the «Landing Beaches, Normandy 1944» for the inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List, in the category of cultural property.
The «Landing Beaches, Normandy 1944», were the scene of the operation Neptune, launched on June 6, 1944 on the Normandy coast. This is the first phase of the operation Overlord, to open a new front in the west of Europe against the troops of the IIIe Reich eventually led to the liberation of Western Europe and the end of World War II in Europe. This property proposed for inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List keeps the traces and bears the memory of a fight for freedom and peace.
The D-Day beaches have become a gathering place around a universal message.
This historic site includes the entire Channel Shore on which the landing operations began on June 6, 1944: a continuous strip of water of about 80 kilometres, from Ravenoville in the west to Ouistreham in the east. These pages constitute a relic cultural landscape, in the sense of the testimony left by the Disembarkation event, and a associative cultural landscape, in the sense of association with this place of exceptional symbolic values.
The nomination will be considered by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee at its July 2019 session.
