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UNESCO exhibition on underwater cultural heritage at the National Congress of Chile
Fortifications, sunken vessels and vestiges of Chile's indigenous coastal peoples are part of the UNESCO photo exhibition “Submerged Memory: Chile and the Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage: a pending challenge”, which was inaugurated on 17 October at the National Congress of Chile in the city of Valparaíso.
This exhibition was promoted by the Secretariat of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage (2001) with funding from the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation. It aims to increase knowledge about the 2001 Convention and encourage the Chilean government to join the Convention.
UNESCO defines underwater cultural heritage as all traces of human existence that have a cultural, historical or archaeological character, that have been underwater, partially or totally, periodically or continuously, for at least 100 years.
“We are interested in promoting Chile's progress in ratifying the 2001 Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage. The Convention seeks to guarantee and strengthen the protection of this heritage, recognizing it as a particular element of the history of peoples and part of the cultural heritage of humanity. The Convention puts the exceptional value of underwater heritage at the center of the discussion and the importance of preserving it for present and future generations, since its disappearance would constitute a definitive and irreversible loss,” said Claudia Uribe, UNESCO representative in Chile.
At the opening of this exhibition, the Chilean deputy Vlado Mirosevic, who sponsored this exhibition, said: “this heritage seems at times an invisible heritage for Chilean society (...) This is heritage we must take care of and we hope that Chile will ratify the 2001 UNESCO Convention for the protection of this heritage in the near future (...) and that the Heritage Law will incorporate this underwater heritage that today has no protection under national legislation”.
The ratification of the Convention would allow improvement on major pending challenges, such as the promotion of research and the possibility of an inventory of underwater heritage assets; the enhancement of archaeological sites, awareness-raising strategies on the value of this type of heritage, and the strengthening of control mechanisms to prevent looting and destruction.
Carolina Pérez Dattari, Undersecretary of Cultural Heritage of Chile, said: “We are happy to be able to participate in the inauguration of this exhibition, which values underwater heritage and thus helps to highlight the importance of its protection. To continue working on its preservation, we hope to be able to ratify the Underwater Cultural Heritage Convention very soon at the Congress.”
The exhibition, which lasted until 2nd November 2023 in the Mezzanina hall of the Congress, benefited from the collaboration of the Center for Research in Maritime Archaeology of the Eastern South Pacific, ARQMAR and will be itinerant in different parts of the country.
