Žatec region brings a unique testimony to the tradition of hop growing and its processing in rural and urban buildings.

In January 18th, 2021, the Minister of Culture, Lubomír Zaorálek, signed the documentation for the nomination of Žatec and the landscape of Saaz hops to the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The nomination represents a completely unique cultural landscape, which is composed of two complementary and geographically close components, which demonstrate the impact of growing, processing and trade in hops on the rural and urban environment.

The Saaz hop-growing landscape contains the most valuable and fertile hop fields, on which the world-renowned Saaz hops have been grown and bred for centuries. This hop-growing landscape contains villages with facilities associated with the processing of harvested hops.

The landscape rural component is complemented by the territory of the historical core of the town of Žatec and its Prague suburbs, which are unique in the number of preserved technical monuments, especially from the 19th century, used for the processing and storage of hops.

 The nomination documentation is supplemented by the Management Plan of the future World Heritage Site, which has been developed to care for, protect and present the values of the hop cultural heritage and to develop the hop tradition in order to preserve this wealth for future generations.

The nomination, signed on behalf of the state, will be submitted to the World Heritage Centre in Paris through diplomatic channels by the deadline of February 1st, 2021. This will launch a comprehensive evaluation process, the outcome of which will most likely be known in the summer of 2022.

Žatec and the landscape of Saaz hops represent an important locality where a completely unique story of the continuous development of hop cultivation and processing takes place. This area bears eloquent evidence of the continuing tradition of producing the finest aroma Saaz hops, a crop that is an integral part of our history, and, in this case, one of the world's most recognized types of "beer spices" for more than 700 years.

We are honoured to present to the international public a unique and elsewhere in such a complex form unpreserved hop-growing cultural heritage, we can rightly be proud of. The presentation of a completely specific cultural landscape is also another example of modern holistic monument care developed in our department, which supports the protection of man-cultivated and sustainably used cultural landscapes. “If the nomination of Žatec and the Landscape of Saaz hops is successful, it will enrich the World Heritage List similarly to the historical landscape of the Ore Mountains with a legacy of mining or the Elbe landscape around Kladruby nad Labem, cultivated for centuries for breeding noble horses " said the Minister of Culture Lubomír Zaorálek.

Saaz hops are the highest quality fine aroma hops in the world, appreciated by domestic and foreign breweries. The history of hop growing in our territory is a thousand-year-old. Since 2007, Žatec hops have been protected by the Designation of Origin. The Hop Growers Union of the Czech Republic, Chmelařství, cooperative Žatec and the Hop Research Institute consider cooperation on the nomination to be very important. Efforts to inscribe on the World Heritage List were also supported in 2019 by the International Hop Growers' Convention (I.H.G.C.), which brings together 34 growing countries and 20 trading companies.