The park at Yala was created as a Game Sanctuary by the British in 1894 for shooting and hunting parties and was only established as a wildlife reserve in 1938, when it became Yala National Park. Henry Engelbrecht, thrust into managing Yala, over 100,000 hectares of wildlife with Kataragama to the North, Panama to the east, the Indian Ocean to the south and Kirinda to the west, loved the challenges that this brought into his life.
‘The last irreconcilable’ as Engelbrecht was known, one of the 5500 Boer prisoners of war, brought from South Africa by the British, when the Boer War ended in 1902. Prisoners who took the oath of alliance to the British sovereign were sent home but Henry Engelbrecht refused so was sent to be a warden as a penance.
The park today is divided into blocks numbered one to five and, besides being a wildlife hotspot, covers a number of archeological sites, including the famous ‘Magul Maha Viharaya’, dating back to 1st Century BC; an important memorial on the Indian Ocean side of the park to those that died in the 2004 tsunami, with a wave-like silver monument to remind us of the worlds worst ever natural disaster; and a pilgrims’ bridge from block 1 to block 2 to see Situlpawwa.
‘The last irreconcilable’ as Engelbrecht was known, one of the 5500 Boer prisoners of war, brought from South Africa by the British, when the Boer War ended in 1902. Prisoners who took the oath of alliance to the British sovereign were sent home but Henry Engelbrecht refused so was sent to be a warden as a penance.
The park today is divided into blocks numbered one to five and, besides being a wildlife hotspot, covers a number of archeological sites, including the famous ‘Magul Maha Viharaya’, dating back to 1st Century BC; an important memorial on the Indian Ocean side of the park to those that died in the 2004 tsunami, with a wave-like silver monument to remind us of the worlds worst ever natural disaster; and a pilgrims’ bridge from block 1 to block 2 to see Situlpawwa.
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