Tsingy de Bemaraha

The first sight of the tsingy is disorienting: a plain of grey limestone broken by thousands of needle-like pinnacles rising 30 to 40 metres from the ground, their flanks almost vertical, their tips sometimesarched and intertwined at the top like the fingers of clenched hands pressed together in prayer.

The Malagasy word 'tsingy' is derived from the old root meaning 'where one cannot walk barefoot', and as you move carefully across the rock on wooden walkways built for visitors, you understand why — the stone has been worn smooth by the bare feet of local people moving through these formations for generations.

The geological origin is a story of patient erosion: the limestone shelf was uplifted from the floor of an ancient ocean during the Cretaceous period, and over the subsequent 65 million years rainwater charged with carbon dioxide has dissolved the softer rock along joint lines and fissures, leaving the harder veins standing as the fretted needles that define the landscape.

The Anjaha Portals area contains one of the most impressive cave systems inside the tsingy, where massive stalactites hang from the ceiling of an underground chamber that has been carved by water over millennia, and the sound of dripping water is constant and echoes off the walls of bare stone.

Wildlife in the tsingy has adapted to extreme conditions: the crowned lemur (Eulemur coronatus) lives exclusively in this part of Madagascar, feeding on leaves and fruit among the needles, and the Labord's chameleon (Furcifer labordi) spends most of its life as an egg, hatching only at the start of the rainy season to live a frantic few months of growth, breeding and death before the dry season returns.

The tsingy is also home to the Madagascar crested ibis (Lophotibis cristata urschi), a large bird with distinctive white wings that are visible in flight against the grey rock, as well as numerous species of geckos and insects that have evolved special pads on their feet to grip the smooth limestone surfaces.

The forest that grows in the valleys between the needle clusters is equally specialised, with species of palms andpandanus that are found nowhere else, and in the rainy season the rock pools that collect in the hollows between the needles fill with endemic fish and frogs that have evolved in complete isolation from other surface water populations.

The human communities living around the tsingy are the De'Aude and Masianoka people, who have inhabited this region for many generations and consider the forest and caves to be sacred spaces, with ritual practices tied to the caves that have been documented by anthropologists working in the area.

UNESCO inscribed Tsingy de Bemaraha as a World Heritage Site in 1990, recognising it as one of the world's most dramatic karst landscapes and an exceptional example of biological diversity in a severely constrained environment, and the site has been a Strict Nature Reserve since 1927.

One of the world's most extreme karst landscapes — a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Strict Nature Reserve covering 152,000 hectares of western Madagascar.

The crowned lemur (Eulemur coronatus) is found nowhere else on earth and lives among the limestone needles of Tsingy de Bemaraha.

The geological process that created the needles — 65 million years of rainwater dissolving limestone — is a living laboratory of erosion that can be seen from constructed walkways.