Chitwan — Landseed

Map key

Chitwan National Park

Adjacent reserves

Iconic wildlifetap a species ↗

One-horned rhino

Bengal tiger

Gharial

Mugger crocodile

Asian elephant

Gaur

Sloth bear

Bengal florican

Ganges river dolphin

Leopard

Grassland & wetland birds

Highways & main roads

Park post / HQ

Human settlement · 2020

People per 100 m cell

scatteredtown

Chitwan National Parkno residents

Buffer zone: 273,977 people over 729.37 km² — about 376 per km². Twenty user groups manage 108.87 km² of it as community forest. WorldPop 2020 (constrained) · DNPWC.

Altitude bands · 100–815 m in the park

Mahabharat hills1,500 m +

Beyond the park850–1,500

Churia crest, dry ridge650–850

Churia slope450–650

Sal forest, valley260–450

Alluvial grassland180–260

Floodplain & river100–180

Bands are altitude, not vegetation: sal forest grows on both the valley floor and the Churia slope.

Wildlife · population

Chitwan National Park

A broad basin of 952.63 km² held between two hill ranges and three rivers. Its boundary runs some 309 km as digitised — about 2.8 times the 109 km a circle of equal area would need. It is a far more compact shape than a long ribbon park, but almost every kilometre of that edge is farmland, and much of it is river.

Area

952.63 km² gazetted

Buffer zone

729.37 km² 1996

Boundary

~309 km as digitised

Compactness

0.16 Polsby–Popper

Established

1973

Elevation

100 – 815 m

UNESCO World Heritage — inscribed 1984 (criteria vii, ix, x)

Conservation Outlook — “Significant Concern” (IUCN World Heritage Outlook, 2025)

Nepal's first national park — gazetted 1973; the buffer zone followed in 1996

Seven separate years with zero rhino poaching since 2011 — the record that took Chitwan's rhinos from ~95 to 694.

Area, buffer zone and dates: DNPWC, Government of Nepal. Boundary drawn from OpenStreetMap rel. 6083166. Note: that OSM ring measures ~1,208 km², about 27% more than the gazetted 952.63 km², so the outline here is indicative rather than cadastral — every area figure shown comes from DNPWC, not from the drawn shape. Perimeter and compactness are computed from the OSM ring at roughly 1 km generalisation and are therefore scale-dependent (the true boundary is longer). UNESCO WHC #284. Chitwan's inscribed World Heritage property is 93,200 ha, a smaller 1984 boundary than today's gazetted park — the two are not the same figure.