Two UNESCO instruments touch the atlas directly. The 1972 World Heritage Convention lets member states nominate physical sites, sacred or otherwise, for inscription on the World Heritage List, which brings international recognition, technical support for conservation, and a degree of protection against development pressure; a large share of the pilgrimage sites, temples, monasteries and sacred cities described here carry this designation, from the temple mountains of Angkor to the historic center of Jerusalem's Old City.
The 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage extended the same logic to practices rather than places, creating the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, which now includes ritual calendars, pilgrimage traditions, sacred music and oral epics nominated by the communities that keep them. Both instruments are deliberately neutral about religious content: UNESCO evaluates authenticity, community consent and management planning, not doctrine, and a site or practice can be inscribed regardless of which tradition claims it. The lists have themselves become part of the story religious sites tell about themselves, since inscription is frequently cited by custodians, states and pilgrims alike as external confirmation of a place's importance, whatever its older, purely religious authority had already established on its own terms.