AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The Little Rann of Kutch Wildlife Sanctuary — also known as the Indian Wild Ass Sanctuary — is the last refuge on Earth for the endangered Indian wild ass, a magnificent creature that gallops across vast salt flats in herds led by a single stallion. Spread over 4,954 square kilometres of otherworldly terrain in Gujarat, this is one of India's most extraordinary and underrated wildlife destinations.↗↗
Established in 1972 under the Wildlife Protection Act, the sanctuary sits on UNESCO's tentative list and protects not just the khur (as locals call the wild ass) but a remarkable ecosystem of saline desert, seasonal wetland, and 74 grassy island plateaus called bets — home to nilgai, chinkara, blackbuck, wolves, caracals, striped hyenas, and over 350 bird species.↗↗
A Landscape Like No Other
Imagine a vast, unbroken surface of dark silt encrusted with salt crystals that glitter like diamonds in sunlight and bathe the landscape in an eerie blue haze at night. During the monsoon, the sea and rivers flood this ancient seabed, transforming it into a spectacular coastal wetland dotted with elevated plateaus — the bets — that rise like green islands from a white sea. This is the Little Rann, a transitional zone between marine and terrestrial ecosystems that has no equivalent anywhere else in the world.
