Band-e Amir National Park
Interesting facts
- Band-e Amir is one of the few natural systems of travertine-dammed lakes anywhere in the world.
- The plateau is bitterly cold in winter: the mean January temperature is around โ14 ยฐC, and nights can fall to about โ20 ยฐC.
- Midsummer is almost rainless, with July and August typically recording no precipitation at all.
- Plans to protect the lakes as a national park date back to the 1970s, but decades of war delayed them until 2009.
- The lakes were proposed for the UNESCO World Heritage tentative list in 2004.
- The surrounding uplands form an Important Bird Area of about 41,000 hectares, home to species such as Hume's lark and the Afghan snowfinch.
- Parts of the 1975 Bollywood film Dharmatma, starring Feroz Khan and Hema Malini, were shot at the lakes.
- In 1970 the lakes already featured in a well-known guidebook to Afghanistan by the writer and historian Nancy Dupree.
Why it is worth it
Band-e Amir is a staircase of six lakes set in bare, pale desert rock high in the Hindu Kush, at roughly 2,900 metres above sea level in Bamyan Province. What makes it astonishing is the colour: against a landscape of ochre cliffs and dust, the water is a deep, saturated blue that shifts toward turquoise in the shallows, as if someone had poured it into the mountains. The lakes are named Band-e Gholaman, Band-e Qambar, Band-e Haibat, Band-e Panir, Band-e Pudina and Band-e Zulfiqar, and they sit one above another in a chain.
The lakes were not dammed by people but by the water itself. Springs rich in dissolved calcium carbonate have, over a very long time, laid down travertine where the water flows over rims and ledges, building natural walls that hold each lake back. The result is a rare landscape of mineral terraces and cream-coloured barriers, with water spilling over their edges in thin falls. Band-e Haibat, often described as the deepest of the chain, sits behind a travertine wall around 12 metres high, and its pale curved face is the image most people know; Band-e Zulfiqar is the longest, stretching for several kilometres.
The name is usually translated as the Dam of the Ruler, and local tradition connects it with Ali, the fourth caliph; several lakes carry names tied to that story, including Zulfiqar, after his sword, and Qambar, after his servant; in the stories, the dams are the work of his hand. In 2009 the lakes and the surrounding uplands became Afghanistan's first national park, covering some 600 square kilometres. The high, dry land around them is important for birds: over 170 species have been recorded, among them the Himalayan snowcock and white-winged snowfinch.
The lakes are at their most vivid on clear summer days, when the sun is high and the water is still; most visitors come in summer, when the plateau is warmest. The contrast with the barren rock is what stays in the memory, so it is worth walking the rim of Band-e Haibat and looking back along the chain rather than staying at a single viewpoint.
Getting there
The nearest town is Yakawlang (Bฤzฤr-e Yakฤwlang), about 26 km away. Band-e Amir lies roughly 75 km northwest of the provincial capital Bamyan, which has a small domestic airport (BIN); the nearest international airport is Mazar-i-Sharif (MZR), around 207 km away in a straight line. The usual approach is by road from Bamyan, across the high plateau.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Band-e Amir National Park is located in the central Bamyan Province of Afghanistan. It was established on 22 May 2009 as Afghanistan's first national park to promote and protect the natural beauty of a series of intensely blue lakes created by natural dams high in the Hindu Kush. Band-e-Amir is a chain of six lakes in the southern mountainous desert area of the national park. The Balkh River originates here and flows to Balkh Province in the north.
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