Qualla: Zahamena National Park

Zahamena National Park: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P. Henne, CC BY-SA 3.0. For decades, ornithologists believed the Madagascar serpent eagle was gone. The bird had not been reliably seen since the 1930s, and the rainforests it needed were vanishing fast. Then, in the 1990s, it turned up again - alive, hunting chameleons and frogs deep in the eastern forests that few outsiders ever penetrate. Zahamena National Park is one of those forests. Established in 1997 and sprawling across 423 square kilometres of a much larger protected zone, it climbs the rugged eastern escarpment of Madagascar in folds of dense, dripping evergreen. Unlike the parks built for visitors, Zahamena was built for the things that need to be left alone.

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Image: P. Henne | CC BY-SA 3.0

Zahamena National Park: A Crown of Rainforest

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raffi Kojian, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2007, UNESCO inscribed the Rainforests of the Atsinanana as a World Heritage Site - thirteen separate forest blocks scattered across eight national parks down Madagascar's eastern flank, recognised as a global treasury of evolution in isolation. Zahamena is one of them. The de...

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Image: Raffi Kojian | CC BY-SA 3.0

Zahamena National Park: The Roll Call of the Rare

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Gerrard Keulemans, Public domain. Zahamena's numbers read like an inventory of Madagascar's endemic riches: 112 bird species, of which 67 are found nowhere but this island; 48 mammals, including 13 kinds of lemur; 62 amphibians and 46 reptiles. The indri sings here too - the locals call it babakoto - its black-an...

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Image: John Gerrard Keulemans | Public domain

Zahamena National Park: People of the Forest's Edge

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Masindrano, CC BY-SA 3.0. Two peoples live around Zahamena, and both have shaped the land they border. The Betsimisaraka - their name means roughly the many inseparable - are Madagascar's second-largest ethnic group, long settled along the humid eastern coast and its forested hinterland. The Sihanaka, who...

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Image: Masindrano | CC BY-SA 3.0

Zahamena National Park: The Hard Country

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P. Henne, CC BY-SA 3.0. Zahamena does not give itself up easily. It sits in genuinely rugged terrain - the broken rock faces and undulating ridges of Madagascar's mountainous interior - roughly 40 kilometres northeast of the town of Ambatondrazaka and about 25 kilometres east of Lake Alaotra. Reaching t...

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Image: P. Henne | CC BY-SA 3.0