Happy New Year, everyone, and welcome to 2020! A special welcome to those already in South America, preparing for this year's ETIC, in Colombia. My small MTP New Year's group celebrated this morning by landing on the South Beach of Ilha Grande, Brazil, completing our holiday visit to all 6 parts of the new Paraty & Ilha Grande WHS (the first ever mixed cultural heritage and natural heritage WHS).
Well, it's time to update the list of MTP locations, as we try to continuously refine our accounting of the world's land area. Thank you for all of your input. As we continue to update the MTP maps, we will be releasing a few of our 2020 changes each day over the next several days. Think of this like the annual UNESCO process, where the new WHS are released in daily batches.
Day 1 finds us dividing three countries into their constituent regions:
- Kazakhstan - Now divided into 14 regions and 4 city-states (including Baikonur, which is leased to Russia until 2050).
- Algeria - Now divided into 8 regions
- England - Now divided into 9 regions (in addition to existing MTP items Lundy, Scilly Isles, and other UK locations)
This will add a net 32 items to the list, for a temporary total of 923 items. Note that there is is a known glitch in the iOS app which still shows Algeria, Kazakhstan and England as separate MTP items, for a total of 926. This should be fixed tomorrow. If you want to be 100% accurate today, just leave those items unchecked.
With the division of Kazakhstan and Algeria, the Top 10 countries by land area in the world are now broken into regions on the MTP list. And England now gets the same treatment as most of its Western European neighbors.
Have a look at your new map and update your totals as appropriate. Note that the new region borderlines might not be visible at first on small screens and on the app. But if you click on the map, the regions will appear. We will be improving this experience soon with the ongoing map upgrades.
We'll see you back here tomorrow, with the next set of additions to MTP 2020...
Happy Travels!
Charles Veley | Founder & CEO