Welcome to the Sundarbans

The Sundarbans is the largest single area of halophytic mangrove forest in the world.  The name "Sundarban" can be literally translated as "beautiful jungle" or "beautiful forest" in the Bengali language.

About the Region

The Sundarbans delta is one of the world's most unique regions.  Measuring over 10,000 square kilometers, this is believed to be the world's largest mangrove ecosystem.  It stretches across coastal India and Bangladesh and over the northern part of the Bay of Bengal.

In the Sundarbans, the landscape of water and mud glistens.  The tide flows in twice daily, covering much of the place, deepening water channels, and cutting new ones as soils forever shift.  Maps of the Sundarbans never accurately reflect it in its constant metamorphosis, shapes shifting from one expression soil and water to  another in a continuously reemergent scupture of place.

The Sundarbans exhibits a sort of occasional ferocity that is rarely seen in other places.  Cyclones have torn through this region and have been responsible for the deaths of hundres of thousands of people and countless wildlife.  This is also home to the "man-eater," one of the last vestiges of the Bengal tiger.  It is a place explored by myth and torn apart by history - for tiget pelts, crocodile skins, and deforestation at the hands of Mogul and British colonizers, who preferred farming over fishing and control over this untamed area. 

In this brackish land, people own little and often make their living on the water.  The men and women fish when the season is right.  At other times, the men collect firewood or honey deep within the forests.  Those who live around the protected forest areas have built high embankments around their villages to prevent the flooding of storms and daily tides.

Discover this unusual ecosytem that is home to hundreds of animal and fish species, annual cyclones, some of the world's largest and rarest estuarine crocodiles, and tigers that have a taste for human blood.