Bogota (AFP)
Mountaineering, the art of climbing summits and walls in high mountains, was inscribed Wednesday in Bogota intangible heritage of Unesco.
France, Italy and Switzerland have joined forces to promote mountaineering, a practice that has just been bicentennial, taking its name from the mountain range that these three countries have in common, the Alps, the historic site of this activity.
The first traces of this practice go back to Antiquity: the first corporation in Valle d'Aosta (Italy) dates from the 13th century. The Florentine Petrarch climbed Mount Ventoux well in 1350, Antoine de Ville and Mont Aiguille in 1492 on behalf of King Charles VII, the Swiss naturalist Gessner Mount Pilatus in 1555.
But the founding act, if not the act of birth, remains 1786, with the ascent of Mont Blanc from Chamonix by a singular string that carries in it the values of mountaineering: Jacques Balmat, crystallist and poor, Michel-Gabriel Paccard, doctor and notable.
The "alpine style" is these climbs with a minimum of help and equipment "in respect of the environment and populations, with an ethic," says Claude Gardien, guide and mission manager on the French side.
This is the first time that the annual meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage is held in Latin America.
© 2019 AFP