Tay Do Ecotourism Area

Tây Đô is a name the whole western Mekong Delta knows. Here it belongs to a tourist area in Tân Bình commune, in the old Phụng Hiệp area, about 30 to 40 kilometers southwest of Bến Ninh Kiều.

Tây Đô has long been a nickname for Cần Thơ. It means the capital of the West, and it stands for the economic center of the Mekong Delta. When the tourist area in Phụng Hiệp took the name Tây Đô, its investor may have wanted to tie it to a name the whole region knew. Then came July 1, 2025. Hậu Giang merged into the new city of Cần Thơ under Resolution 60. From that day, the name of the tourist area matched the official map.

The tourist area is known for a small model of the Mỹ Thuận Bridge. It spans the central lake and sits in the middle of a green lawn. Anyone who has crossed the real Mỹ Thuận Bridge over the Tiền River will see why this bridge was chosen.

The real bridge joins Vĩnh Long and the old Tiền Giang province, now part of Đồng Tháp. It is more than 1,500 meters long, and it was the first cable-stayed bridge in Vietnam. It was finished in May 2000, with aid from the Australian government. Before that, people in the western delta crossed the Tiền River by ferry. They lined up, sometimes for a whole hour. The day the bridge opened to traffic was a festival for the entire region.

The tourist area stands on land that was once the Cờ Đỏ State Farm. In the years of the state-subsidy economy, the farm harvested tràm trees and aquatic products. When the country moved to a market economy, the land was handed over to develop ecotourism.

The Phụng Hiệp area is traditional orchard country in Hậu Giang. It is known for a tangled network of canals, dug by the French in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. The Ngã Bảy floating market is a historic symbol of the region. Seven canals meet there, and together they made a floating market of seven directions, busy in its day.

At the tourist area, visitors can ride pedal boats beneath the model bridge, paddle a small boat along the canals, fish, and cross a monkey bridge in the style of the western delta. A monkey bridge, cầu khỉ, is a footbridge made of a single bamboo pole with a handrail. To cross it, a person must keep balance like a monkey moving along a branch. Before the 1990s, monkey bridges were common all over the Mekong Delta, on small canals where there was no money yet for a concrete bridge. Now they live mostly in memory, and in tourist areas that want to keep a piece of the old countryside.

There are also orchards that fruit with the seasons. Depending on the time of year, they give rambutan, mango, mận, durian, mangosteen and longan. Fruit picked in the orchard when fully ripe is often sweeter than fruit bought at a market after days of transport.

For nature that is wilder and deeper, the same old Phụng Hiệp area also holds the Lung Ngọc Hoàng Nature Reserve. It covers 2,805 hectares of tràm forest, and its biodiversity is protected at the national level. It also holds a freshwater crocodile, forty years old and three and a half meters long.