Komodo National Park
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How it came to be
Komodo National Park takes in three large islands, Komodo, Rinca and Padar, and many smaller ones. In 1910 rumours of a land crocodile reached Lieutenant van Steyn van Hensbroek of the Dutch colonial administration. Peter Ouwens, director of the Zoological Museum at Bogor, received a photograph and a skin from him and published a scientific description of the giant lizard in 1912.
Padar and part of Rinca became nature reserves in 1938; Komodo Island followed in 1965 and became a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1977. The national park was declared in March 1980 and extended in 1984 to 219,322 hectares. It was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1991.
In 2004 some 3,267 people lived inside the park, and in 2007 97 percent of them relied solely on the sea for their income. They include descendants of the Ata Modo and fishing families from Bima, Flores and South Sulawesi, among them Sama-Bajau and Bugis. The Komodo dragon is now extinct on Padar.
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