The Places We Can Visit Without Entering

The original Lascaux cave in southwestern France has been closed to the public since 1963 because human visitation was damaging the fragile ecosystem around its prehistoric paintings. Chauvet-Pont d'Arc, home to some of the world's oldest known figurative cave art, was never opened to the public at all. Yet both can now be entered in another sense: through detailed replicas, 3D models and virtual experiences that let viewers move through spaces whose physical preservation depends on keeping almost everyone out.12

For decades, that kind of substitute was treated as consolation. You could not see the real thing, so here was the next best thing. That hierarchy is beginning to change.

Across archaeology and cultural preservation, high-resolution scanning is becoming infrastructure. Laser scanners, photogrammetry, drones and geospatial tools can record a site with enough precision to establish a baseline for conservation, reconstruct lost architecture, monitor erosion and provide data for future restoration. Once that model exists, the same record can become a web-based 3D tour, an augmented-reality object or a headset experience.

The tourist experience and the conservation archive are increasingly being built from the same scan.

The preservation file becomes the destination

UNESCO made that convergence unusually visible in 2025 when it launched Dive into Heritage, an online platform for exploring World Heritage through detailed 3D models layered with maps, video, photographs and guided storytelling. The project began with sites in the Arab States region and was presented not merely as digital outreach but as a milestone in digital heritage preservation.3

CyArk, a nonprofit that has spent more than two decades using 3D recording technologies at cultural sites, now works across hundreds of locations and has turned many of those records into public-facing immersive experiences. Open Heritage 3D, a related open-data effort, currently lists hundreds of 3D datasets, including data representing dozens of UNESCO World Heritage properties.45

This matters because a scan has two lives. To a conservator, it is evidence: the exact lean of a wall, the surface of a carving, the condition of a facade before an earthquake or flood. To a visitor, it can become movement: turn left, look up, walk closer, stand where ordinary access is impossible. The difference is interface.

Conflict creates a second kind of closure

War makes the logic more urgent. Iconem, the French digital-heritage company, has built extensive 3D records of endangered and damaged sites and used them in virtual reconstructions of places including Aleppo, Mosul and Palmyra. Its work with Syrian heritage authorities produced a large database of scanned Syrian sites intended both for documentation and for interactive public access.6

In Ukraine, the purpose is even more immediate. CyArk's Ukrainian Heritage Digitization and Dissemination Initiative trained museum and heritage professionals in 3D documentation between 2023 and 2025. In February 2026, that work fed a virtual museum featuring digitized objects from museums across the country - an online collection built while the physical heritage landscape remains exposed to an active war.78

A virtual tour cannot make a bombed church whole. It cannot reopen a museum in a city under attack. But it can preserve evidence of what existed, give displaced communities access to cultural material, and prevent physical inaccessibility from becoming total cultural disappearance.

That is a different promise from tourism, even if tourism is one of the ways the public encounters it.

Climate changes what “open” means

Climate change creates a slower version of the same problem. Heritage sites do not have to vanish overnight to become less visitable. Rising seas, stronger storms, erosion, salinity, wildfire and heavier rainfall can force managers to restrict movement, stabilize fragile structures or make choices about which portions of a site can continue receiving visitors.

The Heritage on the Edge project, developed by CyArk with Google Arts & Culture and preservation partners, documents climate threats at sites including Rapa Nui, Kilwa Kisiwani in Tanzania, Chan Chan in Peru, Bagerhat in Bangladesh and Edinburgh's historic center. The project uses 3D documentation both to communicate the threat and to establish records that managers can use to measure change.9

On Rapa Nui, where much of the archaeological heritage sits near the coast, 3D mapping has been used to create baseline records as sea-level rise and erosion threaten monuments. At Chan Chan, the enormous adobe city on Peru's northern coast, extreme rainfall and drought cycles threaten structures literally made of earth. The digital model does not solve either problem. It makes the rate and shape of change visible.1011

This is where the phrase virtual heritage tourism becomes slightly misleading. The headset is the glamorous part. The preservation value often happened earlier, in the unglamorous work of scanning a wall before it moved.

The copy is not the place

There is an obvious temptation in all of this to declare that digital access has solved physical access. It has not.

A 3D reconstruction does not reproduce temperature, scale, smell, fatigue, weather, distance, crowd behavior, ritual or the social meaning of standing in a place with other people. A model can preserve geometry while losing context. It can make a sacred or restricted site globally explorable even when the community connected to that site does not consider universal access appropriate.

UNESCO's ethical principles for safeguarding living heritage are useful here even when the object being digitized is a building or landscape. They emphasize community participation, informed consent, respect for customary limits on access and protection against decontextualization or misrepresentation. Open Heritage 3D similarly describes ethical and cultural sensitivity as part of the challenge of making 3D heritage data widely available.125

The new accessibility therefore creates a new gatekeeping question: who has the right to make a place infinitely visitable?

That question becomes especially important when digital replicas outlive the institutions, communities or political circumstances that created them. A physical ruin is governed by location. A digital ruin can be copied, modified, commercialized and detached from place almost instantly.

The strange future of the “real thing”

The most interesting shift may be psychological. For generations, a reproduction was understood by what it lacked. The original had aura; the copy had utility.

But imagine a heritage site that is scanned every year as the coastline retreats. The physical site remains the original, but the digital archive may eventually contain something the surviving monument no longer does: earlier walls, lost carvings, former sightlines, entire structures recorded before collapse.

Virtual tourism can then do something physical tourism never could. It can let a visitor move between versions of the same place: before the flood, after the earthquake, before the reconstruction, after the war. The site becomes not one destination but a stack of documented moments.

That is powerful and also unsettling.

Cultural preservation has always been partly an argument with disappearance. Stone erodes. Paint fades. Buildings burn. Empires fall. People rebuild. What digital heritage changes is the amount of the argument that can now be stored.

The result will not be a future where nobody needs to travel. If anything, physical presence may become more valuable as it becomes less guaranteed. But the old binary - either you were there or you were not - is weakening.

Some places are already being preserved for people who may never be permitted to enter them. Others are being documented for visitors who may arrive after the physical site has changed beyond recognition.

For the first time, heritage tourism is learning how to keep the door open after the door itself is gone.

Reporting & references

French Ministry of Culture, Lascaux Cave - conservation and public-access information. SourceFrench Ministry of Culture, Chauvet Cave - virtual access and conservation. SourceUNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Dive into Heritage is now live! UNESCO launches online platform to explore World Heritage in 3D,” Aug. 4, 2025. SourceCyArk, organization and project overview. SourceOpen Heritage 3D, project mission and current dataset overview. SourceIconem, cultural-heritage digitization and “Millenary Cities” / Syrian 3D documentation overview. SourceCyArk, Ukrainian Heritage Digitization and Dissemination Initiative. SourceCyArk Tapestry, “Our Land, Our Story: Crossroads of Ukrainian History,” virtual museum, 2026. SourceGoogle Arts & Culture / CyArk, “Heritage on the Edge,” climate-risk heritage project. SourceGoogle Arts & Culture / CyArk, Rapa Nui climate-risk documentation. SourceGoogle Arts & Culture / CyArk, Chan Chan climate-risk documentation. SourceUNESCO, Ethical Principles for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage. SourceAdditional context: UNESCO, Culture and Digital Technologies.