Tsingy de Bemaraha

Declared in 1997 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1990 — before it was even formally made a national park — Tsingy de Bemaraha protects an extraordinary stone forest, formed as rainwater dissolved limestone over millions of years into a labyrinth of rock needles as sharp as knives, some of them over 100 metres high. The name tsingy comes from a Malagasy word describing the sound of walking barefoot on the pointed rock, or else meaning where one cannot walk barefoot. The ground is so broken and so sharp that the park's own lemurs have worked out particular routes through the trees to avoid crossing the keenest formations directly.