Alberta and British Columbia are looking to add more international sparkle to Canada’s Rocky Mountain parks.

Seven parks in the Rockies are already collectively designated as a United Nations World Heritage Site because of their spectacular landscape.

Now the two provinces and Parks Canada are talking about asking the UN to add nearby provincial parks and other protected lands to the heritage site. If approved, the expanded area could cover up to 3.5 million hectares of wilderness.

“It is really a stamp of exceptional recognition,” said Mike Murtha, a Parks Canada planner. “This is on that list of places you must see before you die. It is seen by the tourism industry as a great marketing hook.”

Parks Canada would make the application to the UN, which has been encouraging Canada to make the application for three years.

The UN made Banff, Jasper, Yoho and Kootenay national parks a heritage site in 1984. Six years later, B.C. successfully applied to have nearby Mount Robson, Mount Assiniboine and Hamber provincial parks included in the rare designation–there are only 200 such sites in the world.

Alberta is considering including some or all provincial parks and wild lands along the eastern slopes of the Rockies from the Kananaskis area southwest of Calgary all the way up to the Kakwa area northwest of Jasper.

British Columbia is looking at including Height of the Rockies, Kakwa, Elk Lakes, Cummins Lakes, Mount Terry Fox and Top of the World provincial parks as well as the Swiftcurrent addition to Mount Robson Park, said Suntanu Dalal, a B.C. Environment spokesman.

“The international designation is having an increasing influence in world travellers’ choice of destinations,” Dalal wrote in an e-mail.

Tourism and environmental groups say they support the idea.

Don Boynton of Travel Alberta, a Crown corporation, said the UN heritage designation has helped the province market the mountain parks as a tourism destination around the world and mention it prominently in vacation guides, maps and brochures.

Boynton said including more parks and wilderness areas to the heritage site would make the parks even more prestigious and help boost Alberta’s $5 billion tourism industry.