Yala National Park

Yala National Park

Yala National Park is the most visited and second largest national park in Sri Lanka. It lies 24 km northeast of Tissamaharama and 290 km from Colombo on the southeast coast of Sri Lanka. Yala National Park covers 97,878 hectares over the Southern and Uva Provinces.

Yala National park is home to 44 varieties of mammal and over 200 species of birds. This part of the country has the greatest concentration of leopards, elephants and spotted deer. The vegetation in the park comprises predominantly of semi-arid thorny scrub, interspersed with pockets of fairly dense secondary forest.  Small patches of mangrove vegetation also occur along the coastal lagoons. The park is renowned for the variety of its wildlife, most notably it’s many Leopards and it also boasts a large number of important cultural ruins, bearing testimony to earlier civilizations and indicating that much of the area used to be populated and well developed.