Wildlife Sanctuaries & National Parks

Keibul Lamjao National Park

Keibul Lamjao National Park, on Manipur's Loktak Lake, is the only floating national park in the world, a distinction rooted in the physical structure of the land itself. Much of the park's roughly 40 sq km sits on phumdis, thick floating mats of vegetation, soil, and organic matter that have built up over decades on the surface of Loktak Lake, the largest freshwater lake in Northeast India. Visitors and wildlife alike move across a landscape that is, quite literally, floating. The park exists to protect the sangai, or brow-antlered deer, Manipur's state animal and often called the "dancing deer" for its distinctive high-stepping gait across the spongy phumdi surface. The sangai's population history is a genuine conservation-recovery story: numbers fell to just 14 animals in 1975, recovered to about 155 by 1995, and reached roughly 260 by the March 2016 census, making Keibul Lamjao one of the clearer examples in Northeast India of a single-species park successfully pulling a population back from the edge of local extinction. The sangai exists nowhere else in the wild. Beyond the sangai, the park supports hog deer and otters, and its wetland habitat makes it an important stopover and wintering ground for migratory waterfowl, with the heaviest bird activity typically between November and March. The phumdi ecosystem itself is ecologically unusual enough to be of independent scientific interest, quite apart from the wildlife it supports. Because standard jeep-safari infrastructure does not apply to a floating wetland park, visits here are typically made by boat from watchtowers and viewing platforms rather than vehicle tracks, giving Keibul Lamjao a visitor experience unlike any other protected area covered on this site. Its proximity to Loktak Lake's other well-known attraction, the floating Sendra/Loktak fishing villages, makes it a natural pairing for visitors already exploring the lake.