Protected Because People Were There First: From Rock Paintings to a Confederate Battery

Start in northeastern Brazil, where this park holds prehistoric rock paintings and rock shelters. Archaeological evidence at Toca da Tira Peia suggests people lived here as far back as about 22,000 years ago, and UNESCO named the park a World Heritage Site in 1991 for the largest and oldest known concentration of prehistoric sites in the Americas.

In Chile near Punta Arenas, this park sits on a volcanic field with a crater and lava formations. Human remains and stone tools here date to about 11,000 years before the present, among the oldest evidence of human occupation in South America. The name comes from a Tehuelche phrase meaning desolate place.

This Irish park was created in 2023 when the state acquired the Dowth estate. It covers part of the wider World Heritage property that holds the Neolithic passage tombs of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, and it also takes in two country houses, so prehistoric monuments, medieval structures and an estate landscape share one boundary.

On the northwest coast of Malta, this limestone headland holds the ruins of a megalithic temple and Punic-Roman remains that were officially scheduled for protection in 1998. Its coastline is part of the first marine area protected in Malta, designated in 2005, where seagrass meadows, sea caves and a marked underwater trail attract divers.

This sandstone and granite valley in southern Jordan has been inhabited since prehistoric times and carries petroglyphs, rock inscriptions and ruins left by successive cultures including the Nabataeans. UNESCO inscribed it as a mixed World Heritage Site in 2011, recognizing its cultural and geological value together.

A small private forest reserve and bird sanctuary in the foothills of the Maya Mountains in Belize, listed with the Belize Association of Private Protected Areas. Within it stand the ruins of a Maya residential complex with temples, plazas and burial grounds, dated to roughly 830 to 950 AD.

An island in the Gulf of Nicoya that became Costa Rica's thirtieth national park on 24 August 2020. It holds archaeological evidence of indigenous habitation dated to between 1,000 and 1,500 AD, and the ruins of a penal facility that operated from 1873 to 1991 are preserved as heritage structures.

In the Indian Ocean's St. Brandon archipelago, this island was visited in 1846 by the British naval officer Edward Belcher, who found it a principal fishing station. Today it is an uninhabited bird and turtle sanctuary with restricted access to keep invasive species out.

This Nunavut site protects the two ships of Sir John Franklin's last Arctic expedition, lost in the 1840s during the search for the Northwest Passage. Erebus was found in 2014 and Terror in 2016. Parks Canada and local Inuit manage it together, and public access is not permitted apart from Inuit hunting and fishing rights and limited authorized visits.

The last stop is a Virginia state park on the Potomac, dedicated in 1985 on land donated in 1978. It includes the Leesylvania archeological site and the Freestone Point Confederate battery, both listed on the National Register of Historic Places, alongside riverfront recreation.