Mountain Range
Western Ghats
Also known as Sahyadri
The Western Ghats run parallel to India's west coast and are a global biodiversity hotspot inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2012.
Running roughly 1,600 km parallel to India's west coast, from Gujarat down to the southern tip of the peninsula, the Western Ghats (called the Sahyadri in Maharashtra) catch the full force of the south-west monsoon. Their windward slopes are drenched with rain and covered in evergreen forest, while the land to the east lies in their rain shadow.
The Ghats are one of the world's biodiversity hotspots, with a very high number of species found nowhere else – from the lion-tailed macaque and Nilgiri tahr to hundreds of kinds of frogs, orchids and freshwater fish. Hill stations such as Munnar, Ooty, Kodaikanal and Mahabaleshwar, tea and coffee estates, and waterfalls like Jog and Dudhsagar are all part of this landscape.
Many peninsular rivers – the Godavari, Krishna and Kaveri among them – rise in the Western Ghats. In 2012 a series of 39 sites across Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as the Western Ghats.