Can Gio Mangrove Biosphere Reserve

Environmental experts around the world have a word for what happened at Cần Giờ. They call it a miracle.

From 1964 to 1972, during the Vietnam War, the Cần Giờ area was a base of the Rừng Sác Commando Unit, a resistance unit that operated in the mangrove forest. To destroy the base, the American military sprayed more than 1 million gallons of herbicides over the area during those eight years. The spray included the poison Vietnamese call chất độc da cam, known in English as Agent Orange. More than 80 percent of the mangrove forest was destroyed. Old mangrove trees, the đước and the mắm, died in large numbers. The ecosystem collapsed, and Cần Giờ became dead land.

In 1978, Cần Giờ passed from Đồng Nai Province to the management of Ho Chi Minh City. A year later, the city launched a campaign to restore the forest. It was regarded as the largest mangrove restoration project in the world at that time. Millions of đước seedlings were planted.

Nearly fifty years later, more than 31,000 hectares of mangrove forest have been restored. The International Society for Mangrove Ecosystems called it "one of the most widely and beautifully restored mangrove forests in the world".

On January 21, 2000, UNESCO recognized the Cần Giờ Mangrove Biosphere Reserve as the first World Biosphere Reserve in Vietnam, under its Man and the Biosphere program. A biosphere reserve is a UNESCO-recognized area where nature is protected and the people living there keep working the land. A biosphere reserve is a UNESCO-recognized area where nature is protected and the people living there keep working the land. A biosphere reserve is a UNESCO-recognized area where nature is protected and the people living there keep working the land.

The reserve covers 70,445.34 hectares, nearly a third of the area of Ho Chi Minh City. It lies to the southeast, about 50 kilometers from the center. Past the Bình Khánh Ferry and across the Soài Rạp River, the landscape changes completely. The city is gone. Only forest, canals and a wide sky remain.

The main tree of the Cần Giờ forest is the đước. It has one unusual gift: it lives in salt water. Its roots filter the salt, and prop roots rise above the ground like stakes, helping the tree stand firm in the mud. Its fruit sprouts while still on the mother tree, so when it drops, it takes root in the mud at once. Most of the đước trees standing today were planted in the eighties and nineties, which makes them 30 to 45 years old.

On Đảo Khỉ, or Monkey Island, in Long Hòa, about 1,000 long-tailed macaques live in the wild, not in captivity. The monkeys are very mischievous. They run everywhere and climb noisily, and now and then they snatch things from visitors as if it were a game. A thousand monkeys living free in the middle of a mangrove forest are not easily forgotten.

Inside the core zone, the Vàm Sát ecotourism area was recognized in 2003 by the World Tourism Organization as one of the two most sustainable ecotourism sites in the world.

Every year on the sixteenth and seventeenth days of the eighth lunar month, the Nghinh Ông Festival takes place at Lăng Ông Thủy Tướng in Cần Giờ. It is a festival in which fishermen worship the whale, and one of the largest sea festivals in southern Vietnam.

Cần Giờ is also known for its seafood: sea crab with firm meat, tiger prawns, blood clams, squid, and fish fresh from the sea.

Cần Giờ is called the green lung of Ho Chi Minh City. The mangroves absorb carbon, break the force of waves and hold back erosion along the coast. They shelter the huge city behind them from storms off the sea. As the climate changes, that role grows larger.

Only a few decades ago, this place was dead land. Now it stands before the world as a miracle, living proof that nature can come back, if it is given room to breathe.