The St. Kitts and Nevis National Commission for UNESCO and the Brimstone Hill Fortress National Park Society, with assistance from UNESCO through the World Heritage Centre and the Cluster Office for the Caribbean, will host a two-day capacity-building workshop focused on the conservation and management of military type architecture World Heritage sites in the Caribbean sub-region, from 8 to 9 November 2016.

The workshop is organized with funding support from the UNESCO/Netherlands Funds-in-Trust, and aims to stimulate discussion amongst Caribbean State Parties and strengthen national capacities concerning the management and state of conservation of such properties, in keeping with the requirements for the effective implementation of the 1972 Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage.

The initiative for this workshop stems from impacts to a portion of the Brimstone Hill Fortress, and the profound concern of the national authorities of St. Kitts and Nevis regarding existing limited capacities in the field of conservation and management at the Brimstone Hill Fortress National Park (and similar sites) and the need to augment same, thereby protecting the property’s integrity and by extension its outstanding universal value.

The workshop will be facilitated by an expert from the International Scientific Committee on Fortifications and Military Heritage (ICOFORT), and will welcome experts from Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica. Participants from St. Kitts and Nevis will represent a broad selection of those in academia, culture and structural engineering, as well as technicians involved in the maintenance and restoration of these types of properties.

The Brimstone Hill Fortress National Park, inscribed as World Heritage in 1999, is described as ‘an outstanding, well-preserved example of 17th and 18th century military architecture in a Caribbean context.’

For more information about this workshop, please contact the UNESCO Cluster Office for the Caribbean at
telephone: (876) 630-5300 or
e-mail: kingston(at)unesco.org