Place · national park & lion refuge · India
Gir National Park
Also known as Gir Forest, Gir, Sasan Gir, Asiatic lion
The dry teak and acacia forest south of Junagadh that is the only place on earth where the Asiatic lion survives in the wild. The Nawab of Junagadh closed it to shooting around 1900, when perhaps a dozen animals were left; the 2025 census counted about eight hundred and ninety.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 21.124, 70.824
Worth knowing
The lion in the Sarnath capital, on every Indian passport and coin, is this animal rather than the African one, and it came within a dozen individuals of being extinct while the emblem was being chosen. Maldhari pastoralists still graze buffalo inside the sanctuary, which is unusual for a protected area of this importance.
Connections (2)
- Site adjacencyJunagadh Uparkot
The Gir forest lies south of Junagadh, and it is the Nawab of Junagadh who closed it to shooting around 1900 when perhaps a dozen Asiatic lions were left alive anywhere. The 2025 census counted about eight hundred and ninety. A princely state's hunting ban is the reason the animal on the national emblem still exists outside a zoo.
- AnalogueSārnāth
The four lions on the Sarnath capital are Asiatic lions, the animal that survives in one forest in Gujarat and nowhere else in the world. The Republic adopted the capital as its emblem in 1950, fifty years after the species had come within a dozen individuals of extinction, and the population has recovered inside a single district while the emblem has gone on every coin and passport.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Gir National Park”. Gujarat Forest Department Asiatic lion population estimation reports; Divyabhanusinh, The Story of Asia's Lions (2005).
Open Gir National Park in the repository →