Protected Areas That Share a Border, From Waterton and Glacier to the Wadden Sea

Waterton Lakes sits in the southwest corner of Alberta, directly bordering Glacier National Park in Montana. Canada formed it in 1895 as the Kootenay Lakes Forest Reserve, which makes it the oldest park on this path and the first of the border pairs.

Glacier is the American half of that pair, in northwestern Montana on the border with Canada. It is the centerpiece of the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem, a region of protected land that also reaches across the border.

Costa Rica and Panama manage La Amistad jointly in the Cordillera de Talamanca, and it was formally established on 6 September 1988. Cerro Chirripo, the highest point in Costa Rica, lies within it, and the Talamanca Range portion has held UNESCO World Heritage status since 1983.

Iguazu, established in 1934 in Argentina's Misiones Province, protects the Argentine side of the Iguazu Falls. It lies on one bank of the river, opposite a Brazilian park that is administered separately, so one waterfall is looked after by two agencies.

Brazil created Iguacu by federal decree on 10 January 1939 to protect its side of the same falls and the Atlantic Forest around them. With its Argentine counterpart it forms one of the largest remaining tracts of that forest, yet it has its own manager and its own World Heritage listing in 1986.

Kgalagadi joins South Africa's Kalahari Gemsbok National Park, established in 1931, with Botswana's Gemsbok National Park in a single area agreed in 2000. Wildlife moves freely across the international border along the Nossob and Auob riverbeds, so the park works as one ecological unit.

This peace park was formed in 2003 when the presidents of Namibia and South Africa agreed to join Namibia's Ai-Ais Hot Springs Game Park with South Africa's Richtersveld National Park. It takes in the Fish River Canyon, Africa's largest canyon, and keeps the pastoral lands and language of the Nama people.

Mount Elgon is an extinct shield volcano divided between two countries, with Kenya gazetting its share in 1968 and Uganda its share in 1992. Two wildlife authorities, one in each country, manage the mountain that feeds the Nzoia and Turkwel rivers, and elephants enter Kitum Cave to mine salt from its walls.

Bialowieza straddles the border between Poland and Belarus and is one of the last large fragments of the primeval forest that once covered the European Plain. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and shelters more than 800 European bison, along with ancient oaks, some of them individually named.

Tatra National Park, established on 1 January 1949, shares a natural border with Poland, and the two countries have cooperated on protection since the early twentieth century. That cooperation led to a UNESCO transboundary biosphere reserve covering a national park on each side of the boundary.

Slovak Karst was declared a national park on 1 March 2002 after earlier protection as a landscape area in 1973. Part of it forms the World Heritage Site of the Caves of Aggtelek Karst and Slovak Karst, which Slovakia shares with Hungary.

The Wadden Sea ends the path with the widest partnership, three countries sharing one tidal landscape. The Dutch and German sections were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2009 and Denmark's was added in 2014, coordinated by the Common Wadden Sea Secretariat for the birds of the East Atlantic Flyway.