# UNESCO lists Historic Cairo, including the Citadel of Saladin, as World Heritage

Date: 1979

## The fact

In 1979 UNESCO inscribed Historic Cairo. The Citadel of [Saladin](/people/saladin) is a principal monument inside that inscription. The listing is a completed international-conservation act. It does not reopen 1176 building accounts.

## Context

Listing creates duties, tourist frames, and restoration politics. Aga Khan and WMF campaigns are later instruments.

Saladin is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

UNESCO list 89 and Egypt’s citadel page independently describe the fortress inside Historic Cairo.

Official or archival record: UNESCO — Historic Cairo (https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/89/; UNESCO World Heritage Centre).

## Significance

Conservation-access path. Medium confidence on welfare size.

Heritage listing can fund conservation and overcrowding. Split later restoration Facts.

## What is established and what is not

Established: Historic Cairo was listed in 1979 with the citadel inside the property. Not established: that listing changed a poverty series in Darb al-Ahmar by a known coefficient.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.
Later competitions, monuments, translations, UNESCO listings, and museums are not converted into extra lifetime acts. The attached driver is [humanitarian-access](/drivers/humanitarian-access). The welfare reading used in this dossier is improving. That reading is an impact-path choice, not a property stored on the Fact itself. Confidence is stated on the impact path. A later English edition is not a recovered autograph. If a number is not in the two records named above, it is not supplied here.

## People

- Saladin: https://factrail.ai/people/saladin

## Drivers

- Humanitarian Access: https://factrail.ai/drivers/humanitarian-access

## Sources

- https://egymonuments.gov.eg/en/archaeological-sites/cairo-citadel/
- https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/89/

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/sa-unesco-historic-cairo-1979