Tajikistan

Tajik National Park

WHS Score 3.46 Votes 18 Average 3.97

Tajik National Park (Mountains of the Pamirs) is a very high mountainous and glacial landscape of spectacular beauty.

It lies at the center of the 'Pamir knot' where tectonic forces have pushed up the Himalaya, Karakoram, Hindu Kush, Kunlun and Tien Shan mountain ranges. Notable areas include the Fedchenko Glacier, the longest valley glacier outside of the Polar Regions, Sarez Lake, the largest freshwater lake in Central Asia, created by an earthquake-generated landslide, Karakul Lake, one of the highest salt lakes in the world and formed after a meteorite impact. Ismoil Somoni Peak (formerly known as Stalin Peak and Communism Peak), at 7,495 m high the highest peak in the Pamirs.

Community Perspective: all reviewers so far visited as part of a multi-day and permit-required trip along the Pamir Highway from Osh in Kyrgyzstan to Tajikistan, which includes a stop at Lake Karakul.

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Site Info

Official Information
Full Name
Tajik National Park (Mountains of the Pamirs) (ID: 1252)
Country
Tajikistan
Status
Inscribed 2013 Site history
History of Tajik National Park
WHS Type
Natural
Criteria
  • vii
  • viii
Links
UNESCO
whc.unesco.org
All Links
UNESCO.org
Related Resources

Community Information

  • Community Category
  • Natural landscape: Mountain
Travel Information
No travel information
Recent Connections
View all (29) .
Connections of Tajik National Park
Individual People
  • Marco Polo
    visited the Pamir mountains and wrote about them (Marco Polo may have travelled along the Panj River - wiki)
Geography
Trivia
Ecology
  • Extreme temperatures
    It consists of high plateaux in the east and, to the west, rugged peaks, some of them over 7,000 meters high, and features extreme seasonal variations of temperature. (source: short description UNESCO website)
  • Steppe
    "localized areas of steppe and riverine meadows ...part of a WWF priority ecoregion “Middle Asian Montane Woodlands and Steppe"" (AB ev)
  • Bears
    brown bear
  • Otters
  • Bird Migrations
    Bar-headed geese and brown-headed gulls migrate to the lakes in the Tajik NP during summer
  • Peat
    Karakul (Black Lake): .. with its islands, marshes, wet meadows, peat bogs (wiki)
  • Endorheic Lakes
    Lake Karakul

    See en.wikipedia.org

  • Lazarus species
    Large-billed reed warbler: a warbler rediscovered in Thailand in 2006, previous known only from a specimen collected in India in 1867. A study by Russian ornithologists in 2011 indicated that the species had been misidentified as A. dumetorum in museum collections and that the species may be breeding in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, eastern Uzbekistan and south-eastern Kazakhstan. Nests were found in 2011 in the Panj river valley, Tajikistan.
  • Tectonic processes
    Criterion (viii): Tajik National Park furthermore offers a unique opportunity for the study of plate tectonics and continental subduction phenomena thereby contributing to our fundamental understanding of earth building processes
  • Snow leopard
Damaged
  • Meteorite impact
    Karakul (Black Lake) lies within a circular depression interpreted as a meteorite impact crater with a rim diameter of 52 km (32 mi). The impact event is estimated to have occurred about 25 million years ago, or less than 5 million years ago. The Karakul impact structure remained unidentified until it was discovered through studies of imagery taken from space. (wiki)
  • Damaged by Landslide
    The lake formed in 1911, after a great earthquake, when the Murghab River was blocked by a big landslide. Scientists believe that the landslide dam formed by the earthquake, known as the Usoi Dam, is unstable given local seismicity, and that the terrain below the lake is in danger of catastrophic flood if the dam were to fail during a future earthquake (wiki)
World Heritage Process
Human Activity
WHS on Other Lists
Timeline
  • Oligocene
    TNP includes branches of the grandiose Central-Asian mountain ranges which are the result of the uplifting of the Pamirs which started 25 millions years ago and which is still ongoing. (nom file)
WHS Names
  • Named after Queen Victoria
    Karakul (Black Lake): British cartographers and the British administration in India gave the lake the name "Lake Victoria of the Pamirs" in honor of Queen Victoria, the British monarch. All British maps of the time, as well as Imperial Russian maps, used Victoria for the name of the lake. (wiki)
  • Once named after Stalin
    Stalin Peak
News

No news.

Recent Visitors
Reserved for members.

Community Reviews

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First published: 25/09/19.

Walter

Tajik National Park

Tajik National Park (Inscribed)

Tajik National Park by Walter

This propriety covers more than 2.5 million hectares in the east of Tajikistan, about 18% of the national territory, at the center of the so-called “Pamir Knot”, a meeting point of the highest mountain ranges on the Eurasian continent. It consists of high plateaux in the east and, to the west, rugged peaks, some of them over 7,000 meters high.

Visit to this propriety is difficult, because it is the remotest part of Tajikistan. Even if independent travel is possible, I would recommend to travel with a local guide or through a guided tour. The roads are very bad (meaning several punctured tires) and slow, and amenities are few (petrol, shops) even if guesthouses are plentiful. Additional to the Tajikistan visa (available as e-visa for most nationalities), a GBAO (Gorno-Badakhahan Autonomous Oblast) permit is needed, is available for an extra fee when applying for the e-visa, and will be checked several times on the way.

The entire Tajik National Park (TNP) was nominated for inclusion into the World Heritage, without need for a buffer zone (according to the IUCN technical evaluation). The propriety map is however confusing, with a division between a “core”, a “traditional use”, a “limited economic use “and a “recreation” zone. As far as I understand, the entire Park is a core zone according to usual WHS definition.

I travelled in a guided tour around the Pamir Highway in June 2019. We passed through the north-easternmost part of the park. We entered it at …

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First published: 01/01/19.

Stanislaw Warwas

Tajik National Park

Tajik National Park (Inscribed)

Tajik National Park by Stanislaw Warwas

Site visited in May 2008, a pretty long time ago, so probably many things have changed and the access to the park could be easier than it was before. I was only in the eastern part of the park. At that time a special permission was needed to enter Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region; this was issued together with the Tajik visa at the embassy in Brussels for an extra fee.

After spending few days in Khorog and around, we continued to Alichur where the road to the southern lakes (Yashikul) starts. We have not planned anything before and arranged the transportation in a homestay in the village. It took one long day to go to the lakes and back – of course there are only rough roads there but the pickup we rented with the driver was very brave! It was pretty cold and still some snow around.

After that we went on to Murgab – there are many interesting places about this provincial capital but it is located outside the park itself. We’ve chosen two day trip towards Sarez but after few hours of driving the car broke up and we had to walk to the nomad camp for 5 hours. It was a pretty nice and exhausting experience – to be lost somewhere in the middle of nowhere. We stayed there 2 nights ‘cos our driver and guide (one person) took a horse from the camp to get back to Murgab for a new car. We have …

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First published: 06/10/16.

Anonymous

Tajik National Park

Tajik National Park (Inscribed)

Photo in the Public Domain

In 1997, I was fortunate to go on a trip through the Silk Road which culminated on traversing the Karakorum Highway which starts at Kashgar in Xinjiang Province of China and ends in Peshawar, Pakistan. Along the way it passes the Pamir Mountains, Hindu Kush and Hunza. The Karakorum Highway was a feat of engineering and was built by the Chinese when they wanted a link with Pakistan to show solidarity against their then mutual enemy, India. Nonetheless, it was a project that cost many lives as the road was literally carved out of the mountain. The Khunjerab pass into Pakistan was at 4700m and all the while the highway would be at 4000m or more. Totally lifeless and yet spectacularly beautiful with snow cap peaks at >7800m all around. After every couple of hours on the road, you would see no other cars but an occasional cyclist/backpacker (always wondered why?)

Fast forward to September 2016 and the Karakorum Highway is now too dangerous a journey and still yearning for one last chance to savor the moment of total isolation and beauty once more and the Pamir Highway is beckoning at me from my atlas. It runs parallel to the Karakorum Highway for about a third of the way in Tajikistan and as a bonus, it runs through the Tajikistan National Park (WHS).

I go into full gear to make it and here are a litany of obstacles to consider. First of all, its not a convenient place to get …

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