This remote and mountainous landscape bears testimony to the traditional culture of the Hawrami people, an agropastoral Gorani tribe that has inhabited the region since about 3000 BCE.

The property, at the heart of the Zagros Mountains in the provinces of Kurdistan and Kermanshah along the western border of Iran.

[2] The 12 villages included in the property illustrate the Hawrami people’s evolving responses to the scarcity of productive land in their mountainous environment through the millennia.

[1] The earliest archaeological evidence shows that the region was inhabited by humans since Middle Paleolithic Period (more than 40,000 years ago).

[3] Evidence for Late Paleolithic occupation discovered in a cave site called Kenacheh in the Perdi Mala valley.