Welcome by Denis de Kergorlay

I would personally like to welcome you to Europa Nostra’s website and I invite you to browse round, read up on cultural heritage news from across Europe, and to check the many interactive features of our site. Please share your stories, your photos and heritage events and news you think others from across Europe will be interested in. We will be happy to hear from you.

Whether this is your first introduction to Europa Nostra, or whether you have known about us for a while, I hope I can convince all those who are not yet part of our pan-European network to join us and to help us in safeguarding Europe’s rich cultural heritage.

It is a great honour for me to represent Europa Nostra as Executive President. Some (long!) time ago, as a young man growing up in rural France, I took our cultural heritage completely for granted. It was like the air you breathe: something totally natural and obvious. But the threats to my local village by uncontrolled development opened my eyes. I realised that we cannot take the survival of our cultural monuments and landscapes for granted. We need to fight for the safeguard of endangered heritage all over Europe. We need to show how important this direct connection to the past is in adding meaning and beauty to our lives.

Our living heritage is not only an important cultural asset, it is also a vital force which contributes economic and social strengths to our continent. It is something that makes Europe so unique.

I believe that cultural heritage is not only about the past, it is also about the future. In a globalised world where the search for identity is becoming a common quest, to know one's past is key to feeling grounded and connected in the present. What makes us European is much more than a collection of monuments and landscapes, it is the way we look at our history and feel emotionally connected to it. That does in no way mean you have to have been born in Europe to be part of it. Europe is in a sense a state of mind, where the past can be openly discussed and revisited. Caring for our cultural heritage, in my opinion, has nothing to do with keeping things as they are, and it has everything to do with a love of life, about being part of living history, about being part of a 'bigger picture'.

Europa Nostra is the voice of cultural heritage in Europe and lobbies on behalf of its members for all European monuments and cultural landscapes. Caring for cultural heritage - at a European or at a local level - is for me something very intimate and personal. Cultural heritage shows us our common humanity. The people who created it may no longer be amongst us, but what they have left us is a celebration of their passion for life, of their stride for excellence, of the human soul of history.

I hope you will enjoy exploring our website. Please join us if you are not already part of our movement. Share with us your passion for European cultural heritage; celebrate and highlight best practices in heritage conservation and awareness-raising through the ‘power of example’; help us in campaigning in favour of the many too many cases of heritage at risk; check out our heritage tours. Though heritage is often thought of as being of a purely local or national concern, in order to be most effective the celebration and protection of our heritage are increasingly taking place at a European level as well. Join us in those efforts!

Denis de Kergorlay

Executive President of Europa Nostra