The capital of Eritrea, a country with a repressive government that many of its citizens have fled as refugees, has been designated a World Heritage siteby Unesco, the United Nations cultural organization. ... In announcing its decision on Saturday, Unesco called the city “an exceptional example of early modernist urbanism at the beginning of the 20th century and its application in an African context.” ... The city’s Modernist buildings include an Art Deco bowling alley and the Fiat Tagliero building, a service station shaped something like an airplane, with a central tower supporting a pair of 60-foot cantilevered wings. There is also a garage, built in 1937, that resembles the hull of a ship with porthole windows. The Bar Zilli building looks like an old-fashioned radio set, with windows like tuning buttons.

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In addition to Asmara, Unesco named two other World Heritage sites in Africa on Saturday: Mbanza Kongo, the remains of the former royal capital of the Kingdom of Kongo, in present-day Angola, and the ancestral lands of the Khomani San people, in South Africa near the borders of Botswana and Namibia.