Qualla: Phú Quốc National Park

Phú Quốc National Park: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ntt, CC BY-SA 3.0. A feeding dugong leaves a signature. It ploughs through a seagrass meadow and takes the plant up by the roots, and the pale furrow of bare sediment stays legible on the seabed long after the animal has moved on — a track you can follow the way you would follow footprints across snow. In the shallows off Phú Quốc, those furrows are among the last of their kind in Vietnam. Which explains something odd about the national park that covers most of this island: it was drawn to include water, and the creature it is best known for never comes ashore.

Image: ntt | CC BY-SA 3.0

Phú Quốc National Park: Seventy Percent, on Paper

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefan from Dresden, Germany, CC BY 2.0. The park exists because of a signature on Decision 91/2001/QĐ-TTg, dated 8 June 2001, by which Vietnam's prime minister upgraded the Northern Phú Quốc Islands Preservation Zone into a national park. The protected area runs to 31,422 hectares — officially reckoned as roughly seven...

Image: Stefan from Dresden, Germany | CC BY 2.0

Phú Quốc National Park: Up the Spine

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ntt, CC BY-SA 3.0. Phú Quốc tilts. The high ground gathers in the north and the northeast, where Núi Chúa reaches 603 metres and the ridges below it are drained by streams that run hard in the monsoon and vanish in the dry months. The Rạch Cửa Cạn carries most of that water westward to the sea. For...

Image: ntt | CC BY-SA 3.0

Phú Quốc National Park: What Moves in It

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ntt, CC BY-SA 3.0. The mammal list reads like an inventory of things that are hard to see. Silvered langurs travel the canopy in troops. Slow lorises and pygmy lorises move at night at a pace that makes them almost invisible by daylight. Crab-eating macaques and stump-tailed macaques work the fores...

Image: ntt | CC BY-SA 3.0

Phú Quốc National Park: The Reserve Around the Reserve

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ntt, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2006 UNESCO folded the park into something far larger. The Kiên Giang Biosphere Reserve spans 1,188,106 hectares, of which 858,801 are ocean — a designation that treats the coral, the seagrass and the mangrove as one continuous system with the forest, because ecologically they...

Image: ntt | CC BY-SA 3.0