Rock Islands Southern Lagoon

The Rock Islands Southern Lagoon was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2012 as a MIXED property, and protects some 1,000 km² in the Palau archipelago, in the western Pacific.

The group brings together more than four hundred limestone islands of coral origin, uplifted and then undercut by marine erosion at their base, which gives them their characteristic mushroom shape, covered in dense vegetation and scattered across a shallow lagoon of turquoise water.

Its most singular feature is the marine lakes: more than fifty bodies of water trapped inside the islands, connected to the sea only through fissures in the rock, each with conditions of its own and an independent evolution. The most famous is Jellyfish Lake, where millions of golden jellyfish migrate daily following the sun and have largely lost their sting for want of predators. The property's cultural component comes from the remains of abandoned settlements on the islands, with terraces, villages and rock paintings that document some three thousand years of occupation and its abandonment around the seventeenth century.