Often described as India’s greatest wildlife reserve, Kanha National Park is huge. Covering around 2,000sq km, it’s an undulating landscape of plateaus, forests and sprawling, grassy plains. It’s also considered to be the best administered park in India, with active conservation programmes not just for tigers, but for the barasingha swamp deer, and this is the only place in the world where the population has adapted to live on hard ground. Established in 1955, Kanha became a tiger reserve in 1973 through the Project Tiger initiative and is famously where biologist and conservationist George Schaller conducted early tiger research in the 1960s.
At Kanha, we had a fantastic encounter with a male tiger. He wandered up the road ahead, glancing back as if to make sure we were following.
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Today around 100 of these beautiful creatures live here and, along with equal numbers of leopard, prey on the sambar, chital and swamp deer that congregate in its meadows. Kanha’s size means it’s a little harder to spot tigers than in nearby Bandhavgarh, but here you can roam wide and deep, reconnecting with the landscape that inspired The Jungle Book and gaining a more rounded safari experience.
Find out more in our Kanha National Park travel guide.