Robben Island Museum officially commemorates ‘the triumph of the human spirit over adversity’, relating especially to the period of political imprisonment between 1961 and 1991 when Robben Island was most notorious as a political prison for the leaders of the anti‐apartheid struggle. Robben Island became a World Heritage Site in December 1999 because of its universal symbolic significance—its intangible heritage. This paper explores the implications for conservation management planning of interpreting and managing the intangible heritage associated with such sites. Examples will be drawn from the conservation planning exercise undertaken by the Robben Island Museum between 2000 and 2002. The paper will look specifically at how Robben Island’s symbolic significance has been defined and how competing interpretations should be included in the management plan. It then discusses the challenges around managing historic fabric whose significance is defined as primarily symbolic, and ways of safeguarding the intangible heritage associated with it.

Since the signing of the 1992 European Convention on the Protection of the Archaeological Heritage (Council of Europe) (henceforth the Valetta Convention), the Netherlands have been experimenting with the manner in which to implement its contents. The eventual choices that have been made came straight from an essential body of thought from the Valletta Convention: the archaeological record must be protected in situ as much as possible and should be an integrated and weighted part of spatial development (Willems, Kars, and Hallewas 1997). When the legislation (the revised Historic Buildings and Ancient Monuments Act [Wet op de Archeologische Monumentenzorg]) was finally enacted in 2007, archaeological sites became legislatively protected in zoning plans. Before a building permit is issued, archaeological research needs to be conducted. This integration of archaeology in spatial planning creates tension between the quality and quantity of archaeological academic research and spatial quality, which is strived for in the spatial planning and design process. This desire to improve spatial quality in the spatial planning process implies that archaeology, which is considered by law to be a condition in this spatial planning process, is to be one of the providers of that quality.