Place · tea hill station · India
Munnar, Kerala
Also known as Munnar, Kannan Devan Hills
The hill station in the Western Ghats of Idukki district, Kerala, at the confluence of the Mudrapuzha, Nallathanni and Kundaly rivers, developed from the 1870s as a British plantation district. The surrounding tea estates — about 25,000 hectares cultivated across the Kannan Devan Hills — are the largest in south India, and the Munnar town itself is the regional centre of the plantation economy. The Neelakurinji (Strobilanthes kunthiana) flowering across the Munnar hills once every twelve years is the landscape's signature botanical event. Eravikulam National Park above the town holds the largest surviving population of the Nilgiri Tahr.
- Date
- 1877–None
- Function
- Landscape & environmental change
- Patron dynasty
- British Raj · Indian Union
- Tradition
- Standard reference; INTACH, ASI and municipal records; institutional histories.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 10.089, 77.059
Connections (1)
- Site adjacencyKochi
Munnar sits 130 kilometres east of Kochi in the Western Ghats of Idukki district, Kerala — within the same Kerala coastal-and-hill regional landscape that Kochi serves as commercial anchor. The 1870s British plantation development and the twentieth-century tea trade linked Munnar economically to Kochi's port for shipping tea to Europe through the Suez route.