Keoladeo National Park
Posted by Brody on May 21, 2009For luxury hotels, Agra is rich and exciting as it gets. The city is a unique combination of new-world amenities with old-world charm. Adventure waits for you, anticipating your every move with hospitality, grace, and style. There are long lists made of all the important sites you will be recommended to see here, and of course, some of the most famous monuments in the world. It is a feast for any tourist looking for perfect snapshots and wonderful memories.
One of the most interesting sites is Keoladeo National Park. Declared by Unesco to be a World Heritage Site, this former site was used by the Maharajas as a duck-hunting reserve since the late 19th century. It has also been an important part of the life of the locals for centuries. The Keoladeo National Park is host to an incredibly large number of migratory birds, and this makes it of particular interest for the tourists, because of the high likelihood of seeing wonderful varieties of species of exotic birds (and many land and sea animals as well). This site is located where two rivers meet, the Banganga and the Gambhir. It is a bird watcher’s paradise, and has also been recognized as a Ramsar site.
There is a temple to Lord Shiva inside the site, and approximately 21 villages, with combined populations of 15,000 people, live around the site. Restrictions were placed on the locals visiting the temple, and on cattle grazing in Keoladeo, in the 1980s. This lead to some very heated debate between the villagers and the government. They were using the land for medicinal plants, fodder, firewood, water, thatching material, and for using the plants to make crafts. After the ban was passed, the site became a fire hazard, because the locals understood that the area had come, over the centuries, to depend on the buffaloes grazing to keep it under control. This interesting conflict, then, lead to very interesting conclusions, where the authorities and the villagers had to consult each other on what would be the most propitious way to keep the preserve open for tourism and conservation, but also keep the centuries of tradition alive that would keep the park from becoming a casualty of its own preservation attempts. The villagers are allowed judicious use of the forests, while keeping in close conversation with officials to preserve the environment in this amazing park.
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