Andrefana Dry Forests: Visitor and Heritage Guide

The Andrefana Dry Forests are a serial natural World Heritage property in western Madagascar, covering 734,298 hectares with a buffer zone of 838,035 hectares, inscribed under criteria seven, nine and ten. The name will be unfamiliar even to people who have visited it, and there is a reason for that.

The property was inscribed in 1990 as the Tsingy de Bemaraha Strict Nature Reserve. Its boundaries were significantly modified afterwards, and the result was renamed and extended into a serial property covering a representative range of the western dry forests. Tsingy de Bemaraha is what it used to be called, and is now one part of what it is.

The tsingy

The word tsingy is usually glossed as the place where one cannot walk barefoot, and standing in front of it that reads as understatement. Limestone has been dissolved into a forest of gray needles and blades, hundreds of them, sharp enough to cut through a boot sole, cut through by the canyon of the Manambolo river.

Between and beneath the needles are undisturbed forests, lakes and mangroves, and the whole property runs from the western dry forest into the spiny thicket of the southwest. UNESCO's own description reaches for baobabs, flame trees and the Mesitornithiformes, an order of birds fifty four million years old and found nowhere else.

What a serial property means here

A serial property is one inscription covering several separate areas, treated as a single thing because together they hold the value the inscription is about. In practice that means there is no single gate, no single visitor center and no single answer to how to see it.

It also means the management burden is spread across sites hundreds of kilometers apart, which is the difficulty every serial property in this region has.