Qualla: Bokor National Park

Bokor National Park: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0. Nine hundred people died in nine months building a holiday resort. That is the number attached to the construction of Bokor Hill Station in the early 1920s, when the French administration decided that colonial officials in Indochina needed somewhere cool to spend the hot season, and that the top of a 1,081-metre mountain above Kampot would do. The labourers who cut the road and hauled the stone up it were Cambodian. Almost none of them are named anywhere. What they built stands on the plateau today, mostly roofless, and every visitor who walks through it is standing in the result of that arithmetic.

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Image: Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bokor National Park: The Price of the View

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mx. Granger, CC0. Hill stations were a standing habit of empire across Asia - a pre-air-conditioning strategy for people who had chosen to govern a climate they could not tolerate. Bokor was Indochina's version, and it was built at speed and at enormous human cost on a mountain with no road, no wa...

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Image: Mx. Granger | CC0

Bokor National Park: Abandoned Twice

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mx. Granger, CC0. The French left in the late 1940s, driven off during the First Indochina War by insurrection in the surrounding country led by the Khmer Issarak. The mountain sat empty for over a decade. Then, in 1962, the site reopened as the Cité du Bokor, with a casino and new hotels near the...

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Image: Mx. Granger | CC0

Bokor National Park: What the Cloud Does

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JVan - User: (WT-shared) Campaka at wts wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bokor makes its own weather, and it decides what you get. On a clear morning the escarpment gives you an unobstructed sweep of the coast, Kampot's salt flats, the islands and the sea beyond. On a bad afternoon the cloud comes over the edge and the visibility drops to the length o...

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Image: JVan - User: (WT-shared) Campaka at wts wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bokor National Park: The Park Around the Ruins

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Christophe95, CC BY-SA 4.0. The ruins are the reason most people come, but they occupy a fraction of a very large protected area. Preah Monivong National Park was established in 1993, covers 1,544.58 square kilometres, and was named an ASEAN Heritage Park in 2003. Its forests run from dipterocarp and decidu...

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Image: Christophe95 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bokor National Park: Getting Up There

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mx. Granger, CC0. The turn-off sits 8 kilometres from Kampot on Highway 3, or 95 kilometres from Sihanoukville; headquarters is a kilometre in, and the climb from there is 32 kilometres of smooth sealed road. Drivers who know it do the ascent in about ninety minutes. Day tours out of Kampot run ch...

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Image: Mx. Granger | CC0