The sanctuary made for the flower, in the year the flower is out

Kerala did something in October 2006 that no other Indian state has quite done: it notified a wildlife sanctuary for a plant. Kurinjimala covers about 32 square kilometres of high ground above the villages of Kottakamboor and Vattavada in Devikulam taluk, and the reason it exists is Strobilanthes kunthiana — the neelakurinji, which flowers gregariously once in about twelve years and then dies back to seed. The notification is dated 6 October 2006 and the forest minister Benoy Viswam announced it the next day from the stage of the Neelakurinji Fest at Munnar.

Twenty years on, the plant is flowering across the Munnar high range again, and the state has responded with the machinery it now uses for a kurinji year: fixed viewing sites, tickets, hours and caps. What it has not done, so far as we can find in either English or Malayalam, is open the sanctuary that carries the flower’s name.

What is open in 2026

The Forest Department opened a Kurinji Garden on the Chokramudi slopes on 24 August 2026, ₹200 for adults with a lower rate for under-18s, 07:00 to 16:00, with the entrance beside the Devikulam range office on the Kochi–Dhanushkodi highway. Meesapulimala is being prepared by the Kerala Forest Development Corporation at ₹1,200 a head, capped at 750 visitors a day, to open when flowering is general. The Malayalam listings of where the bloom can be seen name Nallathanni, Munnar town, Mattupetty, the Devikulam Gap Road, Chokramudi, Idalimet, Sevenmala and Kundumala.

Kurinjimala appears on none of them. Nor does anything at Kurinjimala appear on booking.munnarwildlife.com, the department’s own reservation site for this division, which sells log houses at Pampadum Shola and Anamudi Shola and lists nothing here at all.

What the department does publish

There is one government document that describes a visitor programme at Kurinjimala, and it is the department’s own two-page brochure for the sanctuary, still on forest.kerala.gov.in and last replaced there in March 2025. It lists four eco-tourism facilities: a nature trail to the Kurinji land, a trek to cliffy rocks, a stay at Kadavari and a stay at Narco point. It gives two contacts — the Forest Information Centre at the Munnar division office on 04865 231587, and the Assistant Wildlife Warden of the Shola National Parks Range at Top Station and Yellappetty — and it says the activities are organised jointly with the Eco-Development Committees of local tribal communities.

It gives no price, no season, no duration, no departure time and no meeting point for any of the four. That is the entire published basis for the phrase “Kurinjimala Sanctuary trek”. Everything else in circulation — the “trekking and rappelling” line that appears on a dozen aggregator pages — is copied text with no counter, hour or fee behind it.

And what you are probably looking at

There is a second reason not to book a flight on the strength of a photograph. On 30 July 2026 Manorama ran a piece telling readers not to set off for Munnar yet, because the violet hillsides going round Instagram were what people here call mettukurinji, a different species of the same broad group. Roughly forty plants are called kurinji; only Strobilanthes kunthiana runs the twelve-year clock, and Kerala Tourism’s own line is that its full flowering falls in September and October. The plant that carries the name mettukurinji in the botanical literature is Strobilanthes sessilis, the topli karvy — a seven-year species that Down To Earth described in 2024 as identical to neelakurinji to the naked eye, and which has no IUCN listing of its own precisely because the resemblance has kept it in the famous plant’s shadow. Its published range is the northern Western Ghats, not this one, so the Idukki usage may be a local name for something else again; the point of the report stands either way.

The apparent contradiction in the dates is not one. The standard sequence is 2006, 2018, 2030 — and yet these hills are blue in 2026 with the department selling tickets for it. Both hold, because different populations of the plant flower on different cohorts. “Once in twelve years” is a statement about a population, not a date on which the whole range turns.