Kirirom

Kirirom National Park lies in Kampong Speu province, at the eastern end of the Cardamom Mountains, some hundred and ten kilometres south-west of Phnom Penh, and protects some 350 km². It was declared a national park in 1993, although its history as a protected area is older.

The plateau rises some seven or eight hundred metres above the Cambodian plain, and that altitude gives it a noticeably cooler climate than the rest of the country. King Norodom Sihanouk developed a hill station there in the 1960s as a summer retreat for the court, with villas and an access road; the name Kirirom means happy mountain, or mountain of joy. The wars and the Khmer Rouge period destroyed those buildings, whose ruins still stand.

Its characteristic vegetation is pine forest of Pinus merkusii, a tropical conifer uncommon in mainland South-East Asia, which forms open woodland with a grassy understorey on the plateau, alongside evergreen forest in the ravines and waterfalls. Its proximity to the capital and tourist and property development around it are its main pressures.