Understand the place through history, meaning, architecture and surviving evidence.
Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park and Hin Nam No National Park is a transboundary natural World Heritage property shared by Viet Nam and Lao PDR, protecting one of the world's most extensive and intact tropical limestone karst systems. The current property was created in 2025 by extending the Vietnamese World Heritage site across the international border to include Hin Nam No, forming a combined landscape of 217,447 hectares with extraordinary caves, underground rivers, geological history and biodiversity. VietnamWaving maps the Vietnamese component at the official UNESCO coordinate for Phong Nha-Ke Bang. The Heritage Map still represents the current transboundary UNESCO identity rather than the pre-2025 property name.
Key things to understand
- Phong Nha-Ke Bang was first inscribed in 2003 and significantly modified in 2015. In 2025 UNESCO approved a transboundary extension incorporating Hin Nam No National Park in Lao PDR.
- The property lies where the Annamite Range meets the Central Indochina Limestone Belt and contains exceptionally old, complex limestone karst.
- Dry high-elevation karst forest, moist lowland forest, freshwater systems and subterranean habitats occur across a highly varied landscape.
- The combined property supports a rich assemblage of plants, vertebrates and cave-adapted organisms, including many threatened and endemic species.
- More than 220 km of documented caves and underground river systems are referenced in UNESCO's current Outstanding Universal Value statement.
- Connecting Phong Nha-Ke Bang and Hin Nam No creates a much larger transboundary conservation unit across contiguous karst and forest.
- Phong Nha-Ke Bang is often associated with spectacular cave tourism, but the World Heritage property is much larger: geology, forests, rivers, biodiversity and transboundary ecological processes are equally important.