Heritage site
Virachey National Park
ឧទ្យានជាតិវីរៈជ័យ
Virachey National Park (ឧទ្យានជាតិវីរៈជ័យ) is a national park in the far northeast of Cambodia, in Ratanakiri and Stung Treng provinces.[1][2] Its forests reach the borders of Laos and Vietnam, and it was among the first areas in the country declared protected, in 1993.[3] At its founding it was the largest national park in Cambodia, and reports of 2011 and 2017 name it the largest.[3][4][1] Mongabay noted in 2011 that it was listed as a Heritage Park of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and a 2023 photo caption in The Japan Times called it one of two such parks in Cambodia.[4][3]
Geography
Mongabay gives the park's area as about 3,325 square kilometers (nearly 1,300 square miles);[1] Into Cambodia gives 3,380.57 square kilometers.[2] Pablo Sinovas, then Fauna & Flora's director in Cambodia, described the park as rising from Cambodia's lowlands into the Annamite Mountains.[3] The conservationist Gregory McCann wrote of mountain jungle, upland grassland and deep river gorges.[1] Thick bamboo grows among evergreen and deciduous forest, and much of the park is unexplored.[3] The Prek Liang River flows through the park to the Sesan, part of the 3S river basin that feeds the Mekong.[3] Deep in the forest lies a waterfall called Yeakkea.[2]
Three protected areas adjoin the park, as McCann listed them in 2017. They are the Nam Ghong Provincial Protected Area in Laos to the north, Veun Sai-Siem Pang National Park to the south and Chu Mom Ray National Park in Vietnam to the east.[1] Fauna & Flora counts the park as part of a transboundary landscape shared by Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, one of the last refuges in Southeast Asia for many threatened species.[5] The Japan Times wrote in 2023 that the park gives a habitat to animals that migrate across the border where the three countries meet.[3]
History
McCann described an old Brao footpath that crosses the park toward the Lao border. He wrote that people once took it to avoid paying taxes, to escape forced labor under the French and to flee the Khmer Rouge.[1] In his account, the path later became a main route of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and during the Vietnamese occupation, trucks and elephants carried timber and rattan out along it.[1] McCann wrote that the area's once-vast elephant herds were slaughtered in the 1980s; he was told that hunters took up to a dozen elephants a week then, and about two a week by 1990.[1]
The area became a national park in 1993.[1][3] The Ministry of Environment manages it.[3] Mongabay reported in 2011 that the World Bank had invested $5 million in managing the park, which had suffered from illegal logging.[4] Mongabay wrote in March 2011 that in 2007 the government had given Indochine Mining, an Australian gold-mining company, exploratory mining rights over half of the park.[4] In the same article, Mongabay, citing the Phnom Penh Post, wrote that Prime Minister Hun Sen had approved a rubber plantation of 9,000 hectares (22,200 acres) inside the park, granted to Srun Sovannaphoum Investment.[4] McCann wrote in 2017 that economic land concessions had cut into the part of the park along the Vietnamese border, and that some of them had been revoked by then. He also wrote that selective illegal logging took place across the park and that poaching was widespread. He had also heard talk of a proposed "border belt" road along the Lao border, through the park's most remote forest.[1]
Wildlife
A short survey in 2007 found signs that the dhole, an endangered wild dog of Asia, lived in the park in healthy numbers.[4][5] It also found gaur, gibbons, macaques, two kinds of bear and otters, and some species that may be new to science.[4] Camera traps set by McCann's team recorded Asian elephants, golden cats, gaur, serow, dholes and sun bears, reported in 2017; he wrote that tigers and common leopards were gone from the park.[1]
In 2018 Fauna & Flora found the park to be the most important stronghold in the world for the northern yellow-cheeked crested gibbon.[5] Ministry of Environment rangers set 12 automatic cameras across the park in April 2019. When the cameras were collected in May 2020, they had recorded gaur, clouded leopards, fishing cats, deer, mouse deer, wild boar and bears, as well as hornbills and pheasants.[6] In December 2021, a Fauna & Flora camera trap recorded the large-antlered muntjac, the first record of the species in Cambodia; the same survey photographed the Sunda pangolin and the dhole.[5][3] The organization set about 140 camera traps in the park,[3] and its 2024 report, published on January 21, 2025, is the first comprehensive biodiversity survey of the park.[5] The kouprey, the national mammal of Cambodia, has gone unseen for decades; The Japan Times wrote in 2023 that the park may be its last refuge.[3]
Communities and rangers
Indigenous Brao and Kavet communities live beside the park.[5] Fauna & Flora works with them on livelihoods that depend less on hunting and fishing inside the park, and on community protected areas.[5] Several community forest rangers and Ministry of Environment officers come from the Brao, a people The Japan Times numbers at about 60,000 in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam; the paper called the park a heartland for them.[3] In 2015 McCann's team found very old elephant dung near the mountains on the Lao border, and Kavet guides told him that only a small group of elephants remained, crossing over at times from Laos.[1] Cambodge Mag describes organized treks into the park, with nights in hammocks and Brao guides.[7]
In 2023, 47 rangers were assigned to the park, about one for every 70 square kilometers (27 square miles).[3] Several came from Indigenous communities, and patrols spent half a month at a time inside the forest.[3]
Development plans
Hydropower sites in the park first appeared in a 2009 national hydropower master plan for Cambodia, backed by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). A counselor at the Embassy of Japan in Cambodia said that JICA had no role in developing the plants and that its part ended with the master plan.[3] In 2023, The Japan Times reviewed confidential documents and maps from private meetings between developers and government officials, which were not made public. They showed three possible hydropower projects in the park, named after the Prek Liang River. The paper wrote that the plans called for dams in the heart of the park. The documents indicated that one dam alone would create a reservoir of 215 hectares (531 acres).[3] The Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Mines and Energy did not answer requests for comment on the plans.[3] Sinovas said that he "would not call" any energy from a dam inside the park clean.[3]
The same year, the British Embassy in Phnom Penh confirmed about £600,000 for the park from the United Kingdom's Biodiversity Landscape Fund.[3] Phanith Chou, an associate professor at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, identified three core areas of the park with the greatest capacity to store carbon, about 28 million metric tons in all. At an average price of $10 a ton, he calculated that the park, left intact, could be worth $280 million.[3]
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 Mongabay, Gregory McCann, The last elephants of Cambodia's Virachey National Park (March 7, 2017)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Into Cambodia, Ratanakiri Province (undated)
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 3.16 3.17 3.18 3.19 3.20 The Japan Times, Anton L. Delgado, In the name of sustainability, Cambodia risks its 'final frontier' of biodiversity (October 29, 2023)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 Mongabay, Jeremy Hance, Cambodia approves rubber plantation in national park (March 13, 2011)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 Fauna & Flora, Conserving Virachey National Park's forest ecosystem (undated)
- ↑ Cambodianess, Rare and Vulnerable Animals Spotted in Ratanakiri Province (May 18, 2020)
- ↑ Cambodge Mag, Ratanakiri: The Cambodia Time Has Not Yet Caught Up With (undated)