Almadén and the new Unesco sites

The good (or bad?) thing about collecting Unesco postcards is that it's a never-ending collection. Not only are there sites almost impossible to get, but every year new sites are added to the list.

This year, the Unesco comittee added 26 new sites (article). I have a couple of them but this week I arranged a trade with Fabienne famalubel and I got a card from Almadén, inscribed as Heritage of Mercury (shared with Idrija in Slovenia).

This is the card I got from Almadén mines.

The property includes the mining sites of Almadén, where mercury (quicksilver) has been extracted since Antiquity, and Idrija, where mercury was first found in 1490 A.D. The Spanish property includes buildings relating to its mining history, including Retamar Castle, religious buildings and traditional dwellings. The site in Idrija notably features mercury stores and infrastructure, as well as miners’ living quarters, and a miners’ theatre. The sites bear testimony to the intercontinental trade in mercury which generated important exchanges between Europe and America over the centuries. The two sites represent the two largest mercury mines in the world and were operational until recent times.

Source: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1313/

Fabienne also sent me two extras! Although I already had cards from these sites, they are really great and show inside views, which I didn't have yet. The first card shows Aranjuez:

The Aranjuez cultural landscape is an entity of complex relationships: between nature and human activity, between sinuous watercourses and geometric landscape design, between the rural and the urban, between forest landscape and the delicately modulated architecture of its palatial buildings.

Source: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1044

The second card shows the Monastery of El Escorial. 

Built at the end of the 16th century on a plan in the form of a grill, the instrument of the martyrdom of St Lawrence, the Escurial Monastery stands in an exceptionally beautiful site in Castile. Its austere architecture, a break with previous styles, had a considerable influence on Spanish architecture for more than half a century. It was the retreat of a mystic king and became, in the last years of Philip II's reign, the centre of the greatest political power of the time.

Source: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/318