Chandel Hot Springs

Chandel Hot Springs serve a district on the Myanmar border of southern Manipur, where the Tangkul Naga, Kom, and other indigenous communities occupy a highland landscape of forests, rivers, and terraced fields that remains one of the least-known and most biodiverse parts of northeastern India, sheltering wildlife corridors connecting the Western Himalayan and Indo-Burman biodiversity hotspots in a landscape whose forest cover supports tigers, Asian elephants, and the critically endangered Indochinese tiger across an area almost completely devoid of infrastructure development. The India-Myanmar border that runs through the Chandel district is one of the most lightly administered international boundaries in Asia, its mountain terrain and dense forest effectively maintaining the conditions of pre-colonial highland autonomy that made the Naga highlands one of the last regions of Asia to be effectively governed by any external authority. The bicarbonate thermal springs, rising through the metamorphic geology of the Indo-Burman mountains, provide warm mineral bathing in a border highland whose combination of biodiversity importance, indigenous cultural vitality, and genuine remoteness creates conditions of natural and human experience increasingly rare anywhere on the planet.