Tajik National Park (Mountains of the Pamirs)

Tajik National Park, Mountains of the Pamirs, was established in 1992 in eastern Tajikistan and protects some 2.6 million hectares, around 18% of the national territory. UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 2013.

The Pamirs are the mountain junction where the Himalaya, the Karakoram, the Hindu Kush and the Tian Shan converge, which is why they are known as the Roof of the World. The park protects a territory of extreme high mountain country, with summits above seven thousand metres, high plateaux above four thousand and deep valleys, in a region that is practically uninhabited.

It contains the Fedchenko glacier, some seventy kilometres long, the largest valley glacier in the world outside the polar regions, and more than a thousand smaller glaciers, as well as hundreds of lakes, among them Karakul, formed by a meteorite impact. It is one of the most seismically active zones on the planet, where the collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates continues to raise the mountains, and the sparse vegetation leaves the geology entirely exposed, which makes it an exceptional laboratory for the study of tectonics. Its fauna includes the snow leopard and the Marco Polo argali, the largest wild sheep in the world.