Comoros Wins Its First UNESCO Listing for Six Medinas

COMOROS · CULTURE

The Comoros UNESCO World Heritage listing granted on 25 July covers six medinas on two islands and is the archipelago’s first entry on the register. It arrives with prestige and no money attached, which is the harder half of the story for a country of about 890,000 people.

What the Comoros UNESCO World Heritage listing covers

The property is serial rather than single. Four of the six medinas are on Grande Comore — Moroni, Iconi, Itsandra and Ntsudjini — and two on Anjouan, at Mutsamudu and Domoni.

Together they cover 30.47 hectares with a buffer zone of 131.68 hectares. The Comoros had proposed three criteria; the committee inscribed the property on two, for cultural tradition and for architectural significance.

UNESCO’s citation describes towns that grew from urban nuclei of at least the 11th century into city-states around the 14th and 15th. What it singled out was social as much as architectural: a hierarchy built on matrilineal and matrilocal custom, age-group systems and patrilineal Islamic tradition that is still in use.

The decision came on Saturday 25 July in Busan, where the committee inscribed 25 new sites in all. The register now holds 1,273 properties across 173 countries.

Six towns, six centuries of Indian Ocean trade

The best-known of the six is the capital’s. Moroni’s 14th-century medina is built around the Friday Mosque, its green minaret facing a harbour where wooden dhows still tie up, behind paved alleys and multi-storey houses with heavy carved doors.

Iconi, further south, goes back to the 12th century and holds the ruins of the palace of the sultans of Bambao, standing a few metres from the sea. It also holds the tomb of Saïd Ibrahim, son of Said Ali, the last sultan of Grande Comore, who served as prime minister of the Comoros in the early 1970s.

Domoni on Anjouan is described in the nomination file as a 12th-century settlement, with a palace from about the 13th century and three more from the 16th. Mutsamudu is a 14th-century maritime town whose citadel was built in the late 1780s.

The islands sit about 300 kilometres off the African coast, at a junction of routes linking East Africa, the Arabian peninsula, Persia, India and Madagascar. The fabric shows it, in zawiyas and fortifications built as much against Malagasy raids as for prayer.

A listing is a bill, not a cheque

Inscription does not release a payment. Assistance from the World Heritage Fund is granted only on a formal request from the state, project by project and against eligibility criteria, with priority going to sites on the danger list.

The country’s culture and arts minister, Saïd Mohamed Ali Saïd, put it carefully. “This listing is not a finish line but a starting point,” he said, adding that the heritage is fragile and in places in real danger.

The threats named by officials are ordinary rather than dramatic. Ania Mohamed Issa, who heads the newly created Office national de la valorisation du patrimoine, said uncontrolled building and what she called modernisation had disfigured the medinas.

UNESCO’s own assessment is candid. The oldest built structures — palaces, city walls, historic mosques — are highly vulnerable, it found, with several cases in serious disrepair.

Who actually paid for the nomination

The file did not appear quickly. UNESCO credits the preparation of the dossier to its own support, made possible by contributions from Saudi Arabia and France, and Comorian coverage traces the groundwork over some twenty years to the national heritage collective and the documentation and research centre, working with France’s national heritage institute, the École de Chaillot, the Compagnons du Devoir and the ALIPH foundation.

One Comorian account adds the Sultanate of Oman to the list of backers. That detail rests on a single source, so treat it as reported rather than settled.

The Saudi money runs through a UNESCO programme for a sustainable heritage economy in Africa, which covers small island states including the Comoros and sits under the organisation’s Africa strategy to 2029. Cultural patronage is one of the cheaper instruments of influence in the western Indian Ocean, and the Comoros sits on a shipping lane between the Mozambique Channel and the Gulf.

For upkeep, the World Bank’s September 2023 country economic memorandum on the Comoros found that investment in the islands’ tourism sites is financed mainly through projects backed by the Bank, the African Development Bank and the French development agency, and that no budget line is wholly dedicated to restoring them.

What it could mean for visitors and investors

The immediate effect is visibility. Officials and local associations expect the listing to draw researchers, partners and cultural tourists, and to support crafts, guesthouses and restaurants around the six sites.

The scale to expect is modest, and the baseline is genuinely unclear. Published arrival figures for the Comoros diverge so far between central-bank series and commercial forecasters that no reliable number can be quoted, which is itself a measure of how thin the sector’s data is.

The economic picture is steadier than the tourism one. The IMF completed the fifth review of a four-year, US$43 million programme in February, releasing US$4.87 million, and projects growth of 4.1 percent this year after an estimated 3.8 percent in 2025.

The islands run on remittances and three crops. Money sent home by a large diaspora was worth about 23 percent of GDP in 2023 on World Bank data, and export earnings rest on vanilla, cloves and ylang-ylang rather than on visitors.

The currency is unusually predictable for a small island economy. The Comorian franc is pegged to the euro under a monetary cooperation agreement with France, which removes the exchange-rate risk that complicates most frontier tourism plays.

President Azali Assoumani, who attended the session, announced a national centre for the conservation of arts and culture. Whether it is funded is the question that decides what the listing is worth.

What to watch

A management plan already exists on paper. It runs from 2025 to 2034 in two phases and is being implemented, with the new heritage office charged with mobilising the money for it.

That last clause is the whole issue, because no costing has been published. The Comoros must report progress to UNESCO by December 2027, for examination at the committee’s session in 2028.

The wider session was not uniformly good news for the continent. South Sudan’s Boma-Badingilo migratory landscape was inscribed on an emergency basis and placed on the danger list at the same moment, while São Tomé and Príncipe won its own first listing, for the plantation estates known as roças.

The third thing to watch is who ends up holding the files. That is the difference between a heritage economy and a heritage grant.

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