Pu Luong Nature Reserve

In the Thái language, the name Pù Luông means the highest mountaintop of a village. The name says it all. The place lives up to it, in height and in worth. It is one of the most important nature reserves in Thanh Hóa, where terraced rice fields and primary forest share the limestone slopes. And animals on the edge of extinction still live here.

The Pù Luông Nature Reserve was established in 1999 in Thanh Hóa Province, and it covers more than 17,000 hectares. The land spreads across two areas, Bá Thước and Quan Hóa. For a very long time it has been home to the White Thái and the Mường.

The Thái are one of Vietnam's ethnic groups, and Thanh Hóa is one of the provinces where they mainly live. The Mường are an ethnic group of northern Vietnam whose language is closely related to Vietnamese.

Two parallel limestone ranges run from the northwest to the southeast and form the backbone of the reserve. Between them lie valleys where villages and terraced fields settle into the land. This limestone system is linked to the far end of Cúc Phương National Park, about 25 kilometers away. That makes it an important ecological corridor for the biodiversity of the mountains of northwestern Thanh Hóa.

The terraced fields here were built by the Thái and the Mường over many generations. They use every slope, bringing water down from above through hand-dug canals to grow rice. There are two crops a year. In May and June comes the season when water is let into the fields, and the terraces fill with silver light that mirrors the sky. In September and October the rice ripens, and the fields glow gold along the mountainsides. The two seasons are two entirely different pictures, and each is beautiful in its own way.

But Pù Luông is not beautiful only to the eye. It is a place thick with living things. Research figures published by the reserve's management board and the press record 1,579 plant species and nearly 600 species of animals with backbones. Of these, 51 rare and endemic species are listed in the Red Book. The reserve is home to Asian black bears, clouded leopards, wild cats, white-rumped langurs and the cầy vằn Bắc.

Behind these figures is a living story. A research project from 2017 to 2020 set camera traps in the Sơn-Bá-Mười area of the reserve. The cameras recorded 14 Asian black bears and 69 cầy vằn Bắc. Both species are on the international IUCN Red List.

Then came a newer discovery. In October 2025, scientists from the Institute of Biology, from Vietnam National University in Hanoi, from Hồng Đức University and from the reserve's management board announced a find with no precedent: a mole entirely new to world science. Its scientific name is Euroscaptor darwini, the Darwin mole. It was collected at heights of 900 to 1,100 meters on the southwest slope of the Pù Luông range. It had never been recorded anywhere in the world before. The scientific name honors Charles Darwin.

All of this means that science is still exploring this land. The forests, the streams and the hidden mountainsides of Pù Luông may hold forms of life that humanity does not yet know.

Pù Luông is also a place to see how the Thái and the Mường live bound to the forest. Villages such as Bản Đôn and Bản Hiêu still keep traditional houses on stilts. They farm terraced fields by methods handed down through the generations. Bản Kho Mường does the same. Life here follows the rhythm of the mountains and forest, the water season and the harvest, and the footpaths that link one village to the next across green hills.

Pù Luông has nothing grand about it and no crowded tourist facilities. But that is exactly its strength. Seeing its beauty takes few services. It takes the patience to go slowly and look closely. One early morning is enough, with the sun rising over the terraced fields.