Places
Sundarbans National ParkWildlifeUNESCOSouth 24 Parganas
The core of the Indian tiger reserve, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1987. Entry is by boat and by permit only, there are no roads and no walking, and the wildlife is seen from the water or from a handful of fenced watchtowers. The forest on the eastern side of the international line was separately inscribed as The Sundarbans in 1997; the wider Indian wetland was designated a Ramsar site in 2019.
Best time: November–February. Getting there: Rail to Canning, road to Godkhali jetty, then a launch with a permit and a registered guide.
SajnekhaliWildlifeSouth 24 Parganas
The reserve's administrative gateway — the interpretation centre, the mangrove nursery, the crocodile and turtle enclosures, a heronry, and the office where entry permits are actually issued. There is a Bonbibi shrine inside the compound, which is where most visitors first see the deity.
Best time: November–February.
Sudhanyakhali watchtowerWildlifeSouth 24 Parganas
The most-used tiger-viewing point in the reserve, overlooking an artificial sweet-water pond dug so that animals have somewhere to drink in a landscape where all the surface water is salt. The pond, not the tower, is the reason anything is seen.
Dobanki canopy walkNatureSouth 24 Parganas
A raised half-kilometre caged walkway through the canopy — the only place in the Indian Sundarbans where a visitor is on foot inside the forest, and the cage makes the reason explicit.
NetidhopaniHeritageSouth 24 Parganas
The brick ruin of a temple deep inside the forest, locally attached to the Behula and Lakhindar story of the Manasa Mangal. Reaching it takes most of a day by boat through the creeks, and it is the region's clearest evidence that the closed forest was once settled.
GosabaHeritageSouth 24 Parganas
The base for most island travel, and the site of Daniel Hamilton's cooperative estate, begun in 1903, which cleared and embanked several islands and ran its own schools, cooperative bank and dispensaries. The Beckon Bungalow, where Tagore stayed in 1932, still stands. It is the single most legible piece of the region's settlement history.
JharkhaliWildlifeSouth 24 Parganas
A tiger rehabilitation and holding centre with an enclosure for animals that cannot be returned to the forest, reachable by road rather than only by boat — which makes it the most accessible point in the region for a day visit.
Getting there: Road from Canning, about 45 km; no boat required.
Bhagabatpur Crocodile ProjectWildlifeSouth 24 Parganas
A hatchery for the estuarine crocodile on the Saptamukhi channel, running a captive breeding and release programme for a species the region's creeks still hold. Open to visitors in the dry season.
Sagar Island and the Kapil Muni templePilgrimageSouth 24 Parganas
The largest island at the Hooghly's mouth and the site of the Gangasagar bathing fair at Makar Sankranti. The temple has been rebuilt more than once because the sea took the earlier structures, which is the plainest illustration available of how the coastline here behaves.
Best time: Mid-January.
GhoramaraNatureSouth 24 Parganas
A small inhabited island that has lost a large proportion of its land area to erosion over recent decades, with most of its displaced households resettled on Sagar Island. The neighbouring Lohachara island, once inhabited, is gone. It is a working village, not a viewing point, and should be visited on that basis.
Bali and PakhiralayNatureSouth 24 Parganas
The two settlements facing Sajnekhali across the creek, where most homestays and lodges are. Pakhiralay's name means the birds' abode, and the creek in front of it is where the local boats moor overnight.
CanningUrbanSouth 24 Parganas
The railhead and market town, laid out in the 1860s as Port Canning — an attempt to build a rival deep-water port on the Matla that failed when the channel silted and a cyclone destroyed the works. The town is what remains of it, and it is now the gateway everyone passes through.
Bakkhali and FrasergunjBeachSouth 24 Parganas
A flat, wide, grey-sand beach at the region's western edge with a casuarina belt behind it, and the nearest thing the Sundarbans has to a seaside resort. Frasergunj was laid out as a planned settlement in the early twentieth century and never grew into one.
Sundarban Tiger Reserve buffer creeksNatureNorth and South 24 Parganas
The Matla, Bidyadhari, Thakuran, Gosaba and Raimangal channels and their branching creeks — a network navigable only with the tide, where the width of a channel can change by hundreds of metres between morning and afternoon.
Best time: November–February.
Kalash and the seaward sandbarsNatureSouth 24 Parganas
Beaches at the forest's southern edge used as a nesting site by olive ridley turtles, with restricted access. The sandbars offshore hold large wintering populations of waders and gulls.