Qualla: Makira Natural Park

Makira Natural Park: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mendel264, CC0. Spread a map of northeastern Madagascar and you will find a vast green smudge where the roads run out. This is Makira: more than 372,000 hectares of strictly protected rainforest, wrapped in another 350,000 hectares of community-managed woodland, together forming the largest contiguous block of humid forest left on an island that has lost most of its trees. Nothing about it announces itself. There is no famous peak, no gateway town. There is only the forest, going on and on, and the astonishing density of life inside it.

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Image: Mendel264 | CC0

Makira Natural Park: The Last Great Forest

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mendel264, CC BY-SA 4.0. Madagascar broke away from Africa roughly 160 million years ago and has been evolving in isolation ever since, which is why so much of what lives here lives nowhere else. Makira holds an estimated half of the island's entire floral diversity within its boundaries. The forest is h...

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Image: Mendel264 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Makira Natural Park: Seventeen Kinds of Lemur

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mendel264, CC0. No place in Madagascar packs in more lemur species than Makira, which shelters seventeen of them. Three are critically endangered. The silky sifaka drifts through the high canopy, snow-white and almost luminous against the dark leaves. The indri, largest of all living lemurs, sen...

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Image: Mendel264 | CC0

Makira Natural Park: Living With the Forest

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mendel264, CC BY-SA 4.0. People belong to this landscape too. The Betsimisaraka and Tsimihety peoples farm its edges, growing rice and cassava to eat and vanilla and cloves to sell. They hunt, gather wild honey, and draw medicines from hundreds of forest plants, an inherited pharmacopeia refined over gen...

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Image: Mendel264 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Makira Natural Park: A Forest Worth More Standing

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mendel264, CC0. Makira is also an experiment in a new kind of economics, one that asks whether a forest can be worth more alive than felled. In 2013, after a decade of preparation, the Makira REDD+ project became the first government-owned carbon project in Africa to sell credits on the voluntar...

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Image: Mendel264 | CC0