Ankarana

Ankarana Special Reserve was created in 1956 in northern Madagascar and protects some 182 km² around a limestone plateau raised above the surrounding plain. It is one of the oldest protected areas in the country.

Its distinctive feature is the tsingy: a karst relief of limestone needles and blades sharp as knives, formed by the dissolution of the rock along its fractures and practically impassable. The name comes from Malagasy and refers to walking on tiptoe, the only thing possible on such a surface. Beneath the plateau extends one of the most important cave networks in Africa, with more than a hundred kilometres of mapped galleries, underground rivers and canyons where the roof has collapsed, leaving strips of forest hemmed in between vertical walls.

Those damp canyons create islands of forest in the middle of a dry landscape, and that is where the wildlife concentrates: crowned lemur, Sanford's brown lemur and eight other species, as well as Nile crocodiles that live in the underground rivers, an uncommon behaviour. The caves hold large bat colonies and a troglobitic fauna still poorly known, and they also contain burials and historic refuges of the Antankarana people, for whom the massif is a sacred place.