Qualla: Bù Gia Mập National Park

Bù Gia Mập National Park: Introduction

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeroen Kransen, CC BY-SA 2.0. The name Bù Gia Mập belongs to a language that most visitors will never speak. It marks a corner of Vietnam's Central Highlands that has always been on the edge of things — the edge of the upland plateau where it breaks toward the lowlands, the edge of the country where Bình Phước province meets Cambodia, the edge of what science has managed to document. When Prime Minister Phan Văn Khải declared it a national park on November 27, 2002, elevating it from a conservation area, the park's avifauna was still largely unstudied. Two decades later, it remains one of Vietnam's less-surveyed wilderness areas — which is also, in a sense, what makes it interesting.

Image: Jeroen Kransen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bù Gia Mập National Park: Where the Highlands End

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeroen Kransen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Bù Gia Mập covers 26,032 hectares of forest in the southern reaches of Vietnam's Central Highlands, a region that forms a broad, elevated plateau before descending into the Mekong lowlands to the south and southwest. The park's highest point reaches 700 meters above sea level — m...

Image: Jeroen Kransen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bù Gia Mập National Park: Water and Power

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeroen Kransen, CC BY-SA 2.0. The rivers of Bù Gia Mập do more than sustain the forest's biodiversity. The headwaters of the Thac Mo and Can Don hydroelectric projects both originate within the park's boundaries, making the forest a direct source of energy for the surrounding region. This gives the park's wat...

Image: Jeroen Kransen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bù Gia Mập National Park: Birds in an Unstudied Sky

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeroen Kransen, CC BY-SA 2.0. BirdLife Indochina has identified Bù Gia Mập as important habitat, and the evidence is compelling even without comprehensive surveys. Germain's peacock pheasant — a species with iridescent blue-green plumage and distinctive ocellated tail feathers, endemic to the forests of Cambo...

Image: Jeroen Kransen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bù Gia Mập National Park: Gibbons at the Edge

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeroen Kransen, CC BY-SA 2.0. The park is also home to yellow-cheeked gibbons — Nomascus gabriellae — acrobatic primates whose loud morning calls carry across the forest canopy at dawn. Like all gibbons, they are sensitive to forest fragmentation; they need continuous canopy to move through and avoid coming t...

Image: Jeroen Kransen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bù Gia Mập National Park: Still Being Discovered

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeroen Kransen, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the decades since its establishment, Bù Gia Mập has received relatively little scientific attention compared to Vietnam's more famous parks like Cát Tiên or Phong Nha-Kẻ Bàng. That obscurity may be its most important current characteristic. Areas that have not been comprehensi...

Image: Jeroen Kransen | CC BY-SA 2.0