Protected Areas · Long read · 13 min read

Eravikulam National Park: The Roof of South India

A plateau of rolling grassland and hidden shola forest, crowned by Anamudi, the highest peak south of the Himalaya. From a planters' game reserve to one of India's best-managed national parks, the story and ecology of Eravikulam.

By GK Global, Adimali, Munnar · Trails & Tales by GK

Above the tea estates of Munnar, the land rises in a wall of grey cliffs to a high, rolling plateau. Up there, the world looks different. There are no tea bushes and almost no trees on the open slopes: only grass, rippling in the wind, rocks, waterfalls, and dark green pockets of forest tucked into every fold and valley. Mist sweeps across the hills in minutes. Herds of Nilgiri tahr graze along the cliff edges. This is Eravikulam National Park, one of the most remarkable landscapes in India.

From hunting ground to national park

Long before it was a park, the plateau was part of the homeland of the Muthuvan people, who still live in the hills around it. When the Kannan Devan Hills were leased to the planters in the late nineteenth century, the high plateau, too steep and cold for tea, was left largely as it was. The planting company entrusted it to the High Range Game Preservation Association, a club of planters, which managed it as a private game reserve. Hunting was regulated, and the Association's rules helped protect the Nilgiri tahr at a time when the species was being shot out across much of its range.

In 1971, under the Kannan Devan Hills (Resumption of Lands) Act, the Government of Kerala took over the lands not used for tea, including the plateau. Eravikulam was declared a wildlife sanctuary in 1975 and upgraded to a national park in 1978. The park is divided into a core zone, a buffer zone and a small tourism zone at Rajamala, the only part that visitors may enter without special permission.

The shola-grassland mosaic

Eravikulam protects the largest surviving stretch of one of the rarest ecosystems in India: the montane shola-grassland mosaic of the southern Western Ghats. Rolling grasslands cover the open slopes and ridges, while small, dense patches of stunted evergreen forest, the sholas, grow in sheltered valleys and along streams. The boundary between grass and forest is often sharp, as if drawn with a ruler.

Scientists have long debated how this mosaic formed. The prevailing view is that both grassland and shola are ancient and natural, maintained over thousands of years by frost, fire and the harsh climate of the summits, which kill tree seedlings in the open but not in the sheltered hollows. The sholas act as sponges, soaking up monsoon rain and releasing it slowly through the dry season. Streams that rise on the plateau feed rivers that flow both west to the Arabian Sea and east into Tamil Nadu.

The climate is cool all year round, with temperatures that can fall below freezing on winter nights. Most rain falls during the southwest monsoon from June to August, with a smaller share in the northeast monsoon.

Flora: orchids, balsams and the blue flower

The grasslands and sholas are rich in plants found nowhere else, including many species of orchids, balsams (Impatiens) and grasses. The most famous is neelakurinji (Strobilanthes kunthiana), a shrub that flowers once every twelve years, turning the hillsides blue. The last mass flowering at Eravikulam was in 2018; the next is expected around 2030. (Read our article on neelakurinji.)

Fauna

The Nilgiri tahr

Eravikulam is best known as the stronghold of the Nilgiri tahr (Nilgiritragus hylocrius), an Endangered wild mountain goat found only in the Western Ghats. The 2025 joint census by Kerala and Tamil Nadu counted 841 tahr in the park, the largest single population anywhere; officials reported 144 newborn calves. The park closes to visitors every year in February and March, the calving season, to protect mothers and young. (Read our article on the Nilgiri tahr.)

Other animals

Elephants, gaur, sambar, leopards, tigers, dholes, Nilgiri langurs and the rare Nilgiri marten live in or move through the park. Its birds include high-altitude endemics such as the Nilgiri pipit, the Nilgiri wood pigeon, the white-bellied sholakili, the black-and-orange flycatcher and the Palani laughingthrush; about 130 species of birds have been recorded. The park also holds many endemic butterflies and frogs, including the Critically Endangered resplendent shrub frog, known only from the summit of Anamudi. (Read more in our articles on the wild animals and the birds of the region.)

Management and challenges

Eravikulam is widely regarded as one of the best-managed protected areas in India. In 2025 it was ranked at the top of a national evaluation of the management of 438 protected areas. Tourism is confined to the small Rajamala zone, where visitors travel on park buses and walk on a single road; the rest of the park is left undisturbed. Muthuvan people are employed as watchers and guides.

The park faces long-term challenges. Invasive trees such as wattle and eucalyptus, planted around the plateau in the twentieth century, spread into the grasslands, and the forest department has been working to remove them. Fire, both natural and set, must be carefully managed. Most seriously, a warming climate threatens to shrink the cool summit habitats on which the tahr and many endemic species depend.