Bangladesh: Nine Attractions and Natural Wonders

A country made of rivers

Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, built on the vast delta where the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghwna rivers meet the sea. It gets very few foreign tourists, and it is not an easy place to travel — crowded, humid, with slow roads — but it has a mangrove wilderness like nowhere else, superb medieval Islamic architecture, and green hills in the far southeast.

The nine below spread across the country from the Sundarbans in the southwest to the Chittagong Hills in the southeast. October to March is the cool, dry season and the only comfortable time to go.

1. The Sundarbans

The Sundarbans is the largest mangrove forest on Earth — around 10,000 square kilometres of tidal channels, mudflats, and salt-tolerant forest at the seaward edge of the delta, about 60 percent of it in Bangladesh. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the last place where tigers live in a coastal mangrove habitat; it also shelters saltwater crocodiles, spotted deer, and river dolphins.

You visit on a multi-day boat cruise from Khulna or Mongla, sleeping aboard and going ashore at watchtowers and forest stations. Tiger sightings are rare; the atmosphere of the place is the reward.

2. The Mosque City of Bagerhat

Near Khulna, on the edge of the Sundarbans, a 15th-century Muslim general laid out a city — Khalifatabad — that is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site of some 50 Islamic monuments in brick. Its centrepiece is the Sixty Dome Mosque, a broad prayer hall actually roofed by 77 domes on 60 pillars, with metre-thick walls and no minaret.

The other monuments — smaller mosques, the general's own tomb, and huge tanks dug for fresh water — are scattered through the surrounding countryside and easily seen in a day.

3. Somapura Mahavihara (Paharpur)

In the northwest, near Naogaon, stand the brick foundations of a vast Buddhist monastery founded in the late 8th century by a Pala king. Its plan is a square of 177 monks' cells around a courtyard, with a cruciform temple rising in terraces at the centre — an influential design that shows up later in Myanmar and Java. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site with a small on-site museum of terracotta plaques.

Nearby Mahasthangarh, the oldest known city in Bangladesh, makes a natural pairing for anyone interested in the region's pre-Islamic past.

4. Cox's Bazar

Cox's Bazar, on the southeast coast, is Bangladesh's seaside resort — a long, flat, gently shelving beach that runs, with few breaks, for some 120 kilometres, usually claimed as the longest natural sea beach in the world. The town behind it is busy and fast-growing, with hotels stacked along the shore.

South of town the coast quietens toward Inani and Teknaf; boats run (seasonally, conditions permitting) to St Martin's Island, the country's only coral island.

5. Lalbagh Fort, Dhaka

Begun in 1678 by a Mughal prince and abandoned when the governor's daughter, Pari Bibi, died during construction, Lalbagh Fort is old Dhaka's calmest historic space: a walled garden compound with her domed tomb, a mosque, an audience hall with a small museum, and formal water channels.

It is the anchor for a walk through the old city — the pink Ahsan Manzil palace, the ornate Star Mosque, the Armenian church, and the chaos of the Sadarghat river port, where huge ferries load for the delta.

6. Ahsan Manzil, Dhaka

The bright-pink Ahsan Manzil was built in the 1870s as the palace of the Nawab family, the leading Muslim aristocrats of Bengal, on the bank of the Buriganga. The 1906 meeting that founded the All-India Muslim League — the party that would campaign for Pakistan — was held here. It is now a museum, its rooms restored to their late-19th-century look.

The riverfront in front of it is one of the best places to watch the extraordinary traffic of the Buriganga, thick with ferries, launches, and tiny rowed sampans.

7. Srimangal and the tea country

Srimangal, in the hilly northeast, is the heart of Bangladeshi tea: hundreds of estates of clipped bushes running over low hills, worked largely by a distinct community descended from labourers brought from central India in colonial times. Local cafés serve a famous "seven-layer tea."

The area also has the Lawachara rainforest reserve, home to hoolock gibbons, and the Ratargul freshwater swamp forest a few hours away near Sylhet, where you row a boat between half-submerged trees.

8. Panam City, Sonargaon

Sonargaon, half an hour southeast of Dhaka, was a capital of Bengal in the medieval period and a centre of the fine muslin trade. Its best-known relic is Panam City: a single street of around 50 ornate Hindu merchants' houses built around 1900, mostly abandoned when their owners left for India after 1947 and now in picturesque ruin.

The nearby Folk Art Museum, in a restored palace and garden, is one of the better museums in the country.

9. Bandarban and the Chittagong Hill Tracts

The far southeast is the exception to flat, deltaic Bangladesh: a band of forested hills along the Myanmar border, home to a mix of Indigenous peoples — Marma, Bawm, Mru, Chakma — with their own languages and Buddhist and animist traditions. Bandarban town is the usual base, for the Nilgiri and Chimbuk viewpoints, the Golden Temple, and treks to Bangladesh's highest peaks.

The Hill Tracts have a long history of insurgency and are sensitive; parts require permits and a guide, and rules change, so check the current situation before planning.

Bangladesh is a demanding trip and a rewarding one. Give it two weeks, keep the itinerary loose, and expect to be the only foreign visitor at most of these places.