Yala National Park

Yala is Sri Lanka's most visited national park, spanning nearly 979 square kilometers across the island's Southern, Uva and Eastern provinces, and grew out of a wildlife sanctuary first protected in 1900 before being reclassified as a national park in 1938. It contains ecosystems ranging from moist monsoon forest to freshwater and marine wetlands, and is best known for sheltering one of the world's highest recorded densities of leopards alongside Sri Lankan elephants, 44 other mammal species and 215 recorded bird species, six of them found only on the island. The park also holds ancient Buddhist sites, including Sithulpahuwa and Magul Vihara, and its coastal sections were badly damaged by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed roughly 250 people nearby and destroyed about 5,000 hectares of habitat that has since been recovering under active management by Sri Lanka's Department of Wildlife Conservation.