Yala National Park — An Eden in Sri Lanka

Overview

In the south-east of Sri Lanka, in the wildest part as it is the most remote from urban areas, the vast plains planted with trees along the immensity of the beaches of the Indian Ocean are like an Eden preserved from the tumult of civilization. The present Sri Lanka is an island-country of more than 20 million inhabitants who cohabit with a fauna often endemic, remarkable by its diversity and its abundance. Yala Natural Park extends over nearly 1000 km2. Its green swampy savannahs are sprinkled with astonishing rocky outcrops: promontories 10 to 50 meters high made of metamorphic rocks dating from the quaternary period, which evoke the tectonic conflicts between the continents: the Asian plate and that of the Indian Ocean are in permanent conflict, these rocks are a manifestation of it and it is the same titanic friction that created the vertiginous folding of the Himalayas some 2000 km further north.