After the mountains and temples, Chitwan shows Nepal's other great face: the jungle. In the subtropical lowland of the Terai, in the south of the country, Chitwan National Park protects one of the finest wildlife ecosystems in the subcontinent, a world of jungle, towering grasslands and slow rivers where wildlife that seems straight out of a documentary still roams free: one-horned rhinos, Bengal tigers, elephants, bears, crocodiles and an astonishing wealth of birds.
It was Nepal's first national park and is a World Heritage Site, and its big story is one of recovery: from a royal hunting reserve and a land ravaged by poachers, Chitwan became a conservation model that has saved the one-horned rhino from extinction. Today, watching a rhino graze in the dawn mist, gliding by canoe past a crocodile or tracking a tiger's footprints in the sand is an unforgettable experience, within reach of any traveller.
This guide helps you plan it: how much the park entry and safaris cost, which activities to choose (jeep, canoe, jungle walk), where to stay in Sauraha, what the culture of the Tharu people who live on this land is like, and what to realistically expect in terms of sightings (rhinos almost guaranteed, tigers very hard). Chitwan is the perfect complement to the mountains: a couple of days of jungle, nature and gentle adrenaline that show you a green, wild and surprising Nepal.
For centuries, the Chitwan jungle was a feared, malaria-ridden land, inhabited by the Tharu people —who are resistant to malaria— and used by the kings and the Ranas as a big-game hunting reserve. In the mid-20th century, the eradication of malaria opened the area to settlement and logging, and poaching pushed the rhino and the tiger to the brink of extinction: from thousands of rhinos, numbers fell to barely a hundred. The response came in 1973, when Chitwan National Park was created, Nepal's first, with army guards to fight poaching. The measure was a success: the rhino population recovered, and in 1984 the park was declared a World Heritage Site. The full story —from hunting reserve to sanctuary— is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The tropical plains of the south: Lumbini, birthplace of the Buddha, and Chitwan, the former royal hunting reserve turned national park for rhinos and tigers.
Read the history of Terai and the south (plains and nature) →They depart from Pokhara, 84 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The name Chitwan can be translated as 'the heart of the jungle', and for centuries that is exactly what it was: a sea of forest and tall grass on the Terai plain, south of Nepal's hills, so dense and so riddled with malaria that it was almost uninhabitable. Malarial fevers killed anyone who tried to settle there, which is why the region long remained a wild territory, home to rhinos, tigers, elephants and crocodiles, and feared by outsiders.
There was, however, one people who did know how to live in that deadly jungle: the Tharu, the indigenous community of the Terai. Over generations, the Tharu developed a remarkable natural resistance to malaria (a genetic adaptation that scientists study today), which allowed them to live on land where almost nobody else could survive. They lived from farming, fishing in the rivers and gathering in the forest, in harmony with a dangerous environment, in mud-and-thatch houses, with a rich culture all their own.
For centuries, the Tharu had the Chitwan jungle practically to themselves, sharing it only with the wildlife and with the occasional royal incursion. Their deep knowledge of the forest, its animals and its plants is an essential part of Chitwan's story, and it is still alive today in the villages around the park, in their food, their music and their dances. Any account of Chitwan has to start with them: for a very long time, they were the only human owners of the heart of the jungle.
Throughout the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, Chitwan's abundant wildlife made the region the favourite hunting ground of Nepal's elites. The Rana family, the dynasty of hereditary prime ministers who ruled the country de facto from 1846 to 1951, kept these jungles for their great hunts (shikar), lavish expeditions that also included the highest-ranking guests, among them British royalty from colonial India.
Those hunts were spectacles of opulence and slaughter. Hundreds of domesticated elephants, beaters and servants surrounded entire stretches of jungle to corner the animals, while the hunters, perched on elephant back or on platforms, shot tigers, rhinos, bears and other game by the dozen in a single day. Accounts from the time give chilling figures for the animals killed in these royal 'hunting parties'. Paradoxically, the fact that Chitwan was reserved as an exclusive hunting ground for the elite protected it, for a while, from heavier exploitation: nobody else could hunt or log there.
That fragile balance would break in the mid-20th century. With the fall of the Rana regime in 1951 and the opening up of the country, and above all with what came next (the eradication of malaria), the old jungle protected by royal privilege was suddenly exposed to a transformation that very nearly destroyed it. The hunting ground was about to become a land of settlers, of ploughs and, tragically, of poachers.
The event that changed Chitwan forever was, paradoxical as it sounds, a public health triumph. In the 1950s, with international help (mainly from the United States) and the mass use of DDT, Nepal launched a campaign to eradicate malaria in the Terai. The campaign was hugely successful: the fevers that had made the plain uninhabitable for centuries largely disappeared, and all at once that fertile land became fit for living.
The result was a flood of migration. Tens of thousands of people from Nepal's overcrowded hills came down to the Terai in search of land, clearing the jungle to turn it into farmland and founding new villages. Within a few decades, much of the Chitwan jungle had vanished under the axe and the plough. The Tharu, who had lived there for centuries, were displaced and often marginalised in their own land, and the wildlife's habitat shrank dramatically.
With the jungle fragmented and the animals cornered, catastrophe struck the wildlife: poaching soared. The one-horned rhino, whose horn sells for its weight in gold in traditional Asian medicine, was hunted mercilessly. Of the several thousand rhinos that had once roamed the Terai, Chitwan's population collapsed to barely a hundred animals by the early 1970s. The tiger and other flagship species were also pushed to the brink. The heart of the jungle was dying, and it needed an urgent, drastic response to save it.
The response came in 1973, when the Government of Nepal created Chitwan National Park, the country's first, on what was left of the great Terai jungle. It was a bold decision: to protect the wildlife from poachers, the Nepali army was deployed, and it has patrolled the park and fought illegal hunting ever since; strict boundaries and rangers were also put in place. Above all, the aim was to save the one-horned rhino from an extinction that seemed imminent.
The effort paid off spectacularly. Under strict protection, the rhino population began to recover year after year, rising from that meagre hundred in the 1970s to several hundred animals in the following decades and turning Chitwan into one of the world's great strongholds for the species. In recognition of its exceptional natural value, UNESCO declared the park a World Heritage Site in 1984. Chitwan was thus transformed from a symbol of destruction into an international model of conservation.
The fight, however, never fully ended. Poaching struck again at various times, especially during the years of the civil war (1996-2006), when surveillance weakened. But Nepal responded with a remarkable effort that has achieved several consecutive years with zero rhinos poached, a milestone celebrated throughout the conservation world. Today the park faces new challenges (conflict between wildlife and the surrounding human communities, tourism pressure, climate change), but it remains a success story. For the traveller who sees a rhino grazing in the dawn mist, that animal is the living symbol of a jungle that very nearly disappeared and was rescued just in time. That, at heart, is the great story of Chitwan.
