Silent Valley - A great tourist spot.

October 20, 2008

Silent Valley - A great tourist spot.

Silent Valley National Park (Core zone: 89.52 square kilometres (35 sq mi)) is located in theNilgiri Hills, Palakkad district, Kerala, in South India. The area under this national park was historically explored in 1847 by the botanist Robert Wight, and is associated with Hindulegend.The park is one of the last undisturbed tracts of South Western Ghats montane rain forests andtropical moist evergreen forest in India. Contiguous with the proposed Karimpuzha National Park(225 km²) to the north and Mukurthi National Park (78.46 km²) to the north-east, it is the core of theNilgiri International Biosphere Reserve (1,455.4 km²), and is part of The Western Ghats World Heritage Site, Nilgiri Sub-Cluster (6,000+ km²) under consideration by UNESCO.Plans for a hydroelectric project that threatened the parks high diversity of wildlife stimulated anenvironmentalist Social Movement in the 1970s called Save Silent Valley which resulted in cancellation of the project and creation of the park in 1980. The visitors' centre for the park is atSairandhri.