Oria Toscana and World
UNESCO Heritage Day

There are landscapes that humanity has decided are too important to belong to a single country, to a single generation. Val d'Orcia is one of them.

April 18 is World Heritage Day. This year, at Oria Toscana, we celebrated it in a particular way: by reflecting on what it means to own land in one of the 1,199 places UNESCO has declared World Heritage Sites.

Val d'Orcia received that distinction in 2004. Not for its Roman ruins nor its medieval buildings — though it has them — but for something far more extraordinary: its landscape. UNESCO recognized that the landscape of Val d'Orcia, with its rolling hills, its rows of cypresses and its fields of wheat and vineyards, is in itself a collective work of art spanning centuries.

A landscape built by human hands

The World Heritage declaration of Val d'Orcia is unusual because it recognizes a cultural landscape: not a cathedral, not an amphitheater, but the result of centuries of interaction between human beings and the land. The Tuscan peasants of the 13th century began to organize this territory in a way that — without knowing it — would turn out to be of extraordinary beauty.

They planted cypresses on the hilltops to break the wind. They left the poderi — the isolated farmhouses — atop each rise, surrounded by olive trees and vineyards. They traced the white gravel roads, the strade bianche, following the contour lines. They did not do it for aesthetics. They did it for function. And the result was one of the most photographed landscapes in the world.

What it means to own land here

Owning land in Val d'Orcia is not only a right. It is a responsibility. Building permits, changes of land use, the architecture of buildings — everything is regulated by UNESCO and by the local authorities to preserve the character of the landscape.

At Oria, this guides us in every decision. The hotel we are developing requires UNESCO approvals that no conventional developer would want to wait for. We wait for them, because we understand that this process is the guarantee that Val d'Orcia will remain what it is a hundred years from now.

Oria members own land in one of the most protected and beautiful places on the planet. It is not a financial asset. It is a belonging to something that humanity has decided to preserve forever.

The other side of the declaration

UNESCO protection also has a practical effect on the value of the land. The 1,199 designated World Heritage sites cannot grow indiscriminately. There will be no new highways crossing Val d'Orcia. There will be no apartment blocks on the hills of Pienza. The landscape is, to a historic degree, frozen in its essence.

That means the scarcity of land in Val d'Orcia — already high — can only increase with time. What exists today cannot be replicated.

"To own land in Val d'Orcia is not only to be the owner of a place. It is to become a custodian of a landscape that humanity has decided must exist forever." — Martín Iglesias

On this World Heritage Day, we invite those who read us to think about what it means to belong to a place. Not in a touristic way. In a permanent, deeded, real way.