Qualla: Central Cardamom Mountains National Park

Central Cardamom Mountains National Park: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For two decades the best protection this forest had was that almost nobody dared walk into it. The Cardamom Mountains were among the last ground the Khmer Rouge held, and everything that made the range useful to a retreating army - no roads, no bridges, malaria, mined approaches - also made it worthless to anyone hoping to move timber out. Then the fighting stopped. Within a few years of the peace settlement of the early 1990s, logging tracks and agricultural concessions were pushing up valleys that had been effectively sealed for a generation, and commercial hunting followed the tracks in. Cambodia found itself holding one of Southeast Asia's last unbroken blocks of rainforest and very little means of defending it. Central Cardamom Mountains National Park - 4,010 square kilometres spread across Koh Kong, Pursat and Kampong Speu provinces - is the answer the country has been improvising ever since.

Central Cardamom Mountains National Park: The People the War Left in the Trees

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Conservation planners in the early 2000s described the area in bloodless terms: a former Khmer Rouge stronghold containing settlements of Indigenous people and former Khmer Rouge families. Behind that phrasing sit two very different histories sharing the same watershed. Indigenou...

Central Cardamom Mountains National Park: Two Ministries, One Mountain

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The protected forest was established in 1999 under the Forestry Administration, and for the next decade and a half the range was governed by an awkward split. Conservation International backed a Central Cardamom Protected Forest project with the Forestry Administration from 2001 ...

Central Cardamom Mountains National Park: Four Hundred Vertebrates and Counting

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The park is home to more than 400 vertebrate species, roughly 70 kinds of fish and over 200 documented plants, some found nowhere else. Asian elephants move through it. So do sun bears and Asiatic black bears, clouded leopards, dholes, leopard cats, and pileated gibbons whose who...

Central Cardamom Mountains National Park: The Weight of a Wire Loop

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The threat that keeps rangers walking is not the chainsaw but the snare. A loop of bicycle brake cable costs almost nothing, catches whatever steps into it, and kills indiscriminately - gibbon, muntjac, bear cub, elephant calf. Patrols through the park in 2022 documented illegal ...