ATLAS · WORLD HERITAGE · MALI
World Heritage Sites in Mali
Mali has 4 sites on UNESCO’s World Heritage List — 3 cultural, and 1 mixed. 2 are currently listed as World Heritage in Danger. Below: how they split by type, and the headline sites. From UNESCO’s official list, snapshot 2026-06-22.
By heritage type
Notable sites in Mali
A spread of the country’s heritage — the rarer mixed and natural sites first, then its earliest inscriptions.
The Bandiagara site is an outstanding landscape of cliffs and sandy plateaux with some beautiful architecture (houses, granaries, altars, sanctuaries and Togu Na , or communal meeting-places). Several age-old social traditions live on in the region (masks, feasts, rituals, and ceremonies involvin…
Inhabited since 250 B.C., Djenné became a market centre and an important link in the trans-Saharan gold trade. In the 15th and 16th centuries, it was one of the centres for the propagation of Islam. Its traditional houses, of which nearly 2,000 have survived, are built on hillocks ( toguere…
Home of the prestigious Koranic Sankore University and other madrasas , Timbuktu was an intellectual and spiritual capital and a centre for the propagation of Islam throughout Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries. Its three great mosques, Djingareyber, Sankore and Sidi Yahia, recall Timbuktu's g…
The dramatic 17-m pyramidal structure of the Tomb of Askia was built by Askia Mohamed, the Emperor of Songhai, in 1495 in his capital Gao. It bears testimony to the power and riches of the empire that flourished in the 15th and 16th centuries through its control of the trans-Saharan trade, notabl…