Qualla: Côn Đảo National Park

Côn Đảo National Park: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nothing about a green turtle suggests she should be able to do this. She weighs more than any two people on the beach watching her, her flippers are built for water, and she is hauling herself up the sand of Hòn Bảy Cạnh in the dark, resting every few metres. Above the tideline she will spend the better part of an hour excavating a chamber with her rear flippers, lay her clutch into it, cover the whole thing over, and drag herself back to the sea. Côn Đảo National Park runs the largest sea turtle conservation programme in Vietnam, and this is the thing it exists for: a few hours of very slow, very heavy work on a handful of beaches, repeated through the nesting season, on which an entire regional population depends.

Côn Đảo National Park: A Park That Is Mostly Water

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Protection came in stages. Parts of the archipelago were given reserve status in 1984, the national park itself was created by Decision 135/QĐ-TTg on 31 March 1993, and the boundaries were extended again in 1998. The shape of the result is unusual for Vietnam. Of 19,883 hectares ...

Côn Đảo National Park: The Inventory

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Surveys have recorded 1,077 vascular plant species on the islands and 155 land vertebrates among them — 25 mammals, 85 birds, 32 reptiles and 13 amphibians. In the water the count runs to roughly 1,725 marine organisms, including 360 species of coral, 205 reef fish, eleven seagra...

Côn Đảo National Park: Seagrass and the Sea Cow

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The park's rarest resident is also its least cooperative. Dugongs graze the seagrass meadows here, and they are the reason those eleven seagrass species matter as much as the coral does — a dugong is essentially a large mammal that has committed entirely to eating underwater gras...

Côn Đảo National Park: Designations and Bulldozers

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On paper the record is excellent. The park was listed as a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention in 2013, as site number 2203, and named an ASEAN Heritage Park in 2023. As far back as 2006 a UNESCO delegation surveyed the islands and concluded they would...

Côn Đảo National Park: Walking In

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The park is not difficult to enter, which is part of its appeal. A ticket office sits up the hill out of Côn Sơn town, directly across the road from the ruins of the Ma Thiên Lãnh bridge, which prisoners died building — the conservation area and the penal colony share a boundary ...