Butterfly reserve a World Heritage site

MEXICO CITY, Mexico Mexico's Foreign Relations Department says the reserve located in the states of Mexico and Michoacan was declared a natural heritage site by the U.N.'s World Heritage Committee meeting in Quebec City.

Each September the butterflies begin a 3,400-mile (5,470-kilometer) journey from the forests of eastern Canada and parts of the U.S. to the central Mexican mountains. The voyage is considered an aesthetic and scientific wonder.

But illegal logging and development threaten a delicate migratory route that has spanned across a million square miles (2.6 million square kilometers) for some 10,000 years.

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