Khao Sam Roi Yot

Khao Sam Roi Yot National Park was created in 1966 in Prachuap Khiri Khan province, on the Gulf of Thailand, and protects some 98 km². It was the country's first coastal and marine national park.

Its name means "the mountain of three hundred peaks" and describes the landscape: a group of steep limestone hills rising directly above the coastal plain and the sea, the remains of a heavily eroded karst. Between them extends the largest freshwater marsh in Thailand, a wetland of reedbed and open water that is the park's ecological heart and an important stop on the East Asian bird migration route, with more than three hundred species recorded.

That wetland has been under enormous pressure from the expansion of shrimp aquaculture ponds, which came to occupy much of the marsh before restoration programmes were undertaken. The hills are riddled with caves, and the most famous is Phraya Nakhon: a large cavity with a collapsed roof through which a shaft of light enters and illuminates a royal pavilion in Thai style built in 1890 for the visit of Rama V, one of the most reproduced images in the country.