Chile

• © UNESCO/Roberto De Armas
• Chile : Easter Island. Sculptures. The seven Moai, enormous stone figures. Easter Island

Chile has been a member of UNESCO since July 7, 1953.

It was involved in the Organization’s creation: Chilean Nobel Prize-winning poet Gabriela Mistral participated in the 1945 London Conference that led to UNESCO’s founding.

The country hosts the headquarters of the UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education for Latin America and the Caribbean, located in Santiago.

Chile, famed for its extraordinarily varied geography, has five sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The Humberstone and Santa Laura Saltpeter Works were added to the World Heritage in Danger List in 2005 to help mobilize conservation resources.

There are eight Man and his Biosphere (MAB) programme biosphere reserves in the country.

The Human Rights Archive on human rights violations during the military dictatorship (1973-1990) and the documentary cultural heritage of the Jesuits of America were both included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World register in 2003.

Among other activities involving indigenous knowledge, Chile is participating in a Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (LINKS) project that focuses on the central role of the Araucaria tree in the Andes in southern Chile.