Rainforests of the Atsinanana: Visitor and Heritage Guide

The Rainforests of the Atsinanana are a serial natural property of six components strung along the eastern escarpment of Madagascar, inscribed in 2007 under criteria nine and ten over 479,660.7 hectares. The six are Marojejy, Masoala, Zahamena, Ranomafana, Andringitra and Andohahela, and all six are national parks with management plans in place.

The inscription is about process as much as about species: these forests are where the island's biota, isolated for tens of millions of years, can still be seen doing what isolation does.

Fifteen years on the Danger List

The property was placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2010, after illegal logging of rosewood and ebony and a wave of lemur hunting that followed a period of political crisis. It stayed there for fifteen years.

It was removed in 2025, alongside two other African properties, following sustained work on enforcement and management. That is a genuinely good piece of news and it is rare enough to be worth stating plainly: the Rainforests of the Atsinanana are no longer on the Danger List. Anything you read describing them as currently endangered predates that decision.

Which one you are actually visiting

Ranomafana is the component most visitors reach, and it is the one in the photograph above: montane rainforest in the southeast, the Namorona river running through it, and a research station that has been working there for decades. Andringitra and Andohahela are in the south, Zahamena in the center east, Marojejy and Masoala in the far northeast, the last of them the largest and hardest to get to.

The thing to be clear about is what is not on the list. Andasibe-Mantadia, which is the rainforest nearly every Madagascar itinerary includes because it is three hours from the capital, is not one of the six components. It has its own page in this cluster and its own reasons to go.

Why the forests matter to this site

Madagascar separated from the rest of Gondwana long enough ago that most of what lives here lives nowhere else, and the eastern rainforest is where the highest proportion of it survives. The band is also narrow, broken and shrinking, which is what put the property on the Danger List in the first place and is why the removal is a beginning rather than a conclusion.