Basel Carnival competes for spot on heritage list

The Swiss interior ministry has asked the United Nations to recognise the Basel Carnival as a globally important cultural phenomenon. The Paris-based United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization announced Switzerland’s official submission on Thursday. The UN cultural agency, known as UNESCO, will decide by November 2017 whether to include the carnival on its list of things that reflect an “intangible cultural heritage of humanity”. The three-day Basel Carnival combines music, spoken dialects, and arts and crafts, and is widely known throughout and beyond Switzerland as one of the world’s few Protestant carnivals. It will be judged by factors such as how well it can be defined as having an “intangible cultural heritage”, whether it proposes adequate safeguards for the event and has community participation. Swiss culture The Basel Carnival is the second event that Switzerland has proposed for inclusion on that UNESCO list. Last year, the ...