If you take a child to Neyyar on the strength of the lion safari, there is something you should know first, and almost nothing published about the place will tell you: for years now there have been no lions in it.
What it was
The Lion Safari Park opened at Neyyar Dam in 1985, run by the forest department, and it was the first initiative of its kind in India. The model was a fenced forest tract through which a guided vehicle carried visitors among lions living in semi-wild conditions — not a zoo enclosure, not wild animals either, but something in between that was genuinely novel at the time.
It began with sixteen lions and at its height held a reported seventeen. For a generation of families from Thiruvananthapuram it was the reason to make the hour’s drive east.
How it emptied
Not through a disaster. Through arithmetic. Captive lions live around twenty years, and a founding population brought in together tends to age out together unless breeding or restocking keeps pace.
The deaths that made the news were the late ones. A nineteen-year-old lioness, Sindhu, died in February 2019 after age-related illness. A twenty-year-old male, Vishal, died of what the forest department took to be old age. Fresh animals were brought in that same year — in August 2019, a male and a female Asiatic lion arrived from Sakkarbaug Zoo at Junagadh in Gujarat, together with three lionesses from Thrissur Zoo — and even that did not hold the line. Reports place the death of the last lion in 2021.
Since then the position has been unsettled rather than resolved. Visitors have found the safari closed for maintenance or renovation; there have been periodic proposals to restock it; and Malayalam coverage has run the obvious question as a headline — why does a park built for seventeen animals stand empty?
The thing the enclosure was always doing
It is worth sitting with what the park was for, because the emptiness is more interesting than a simple management failure.
Asiatic lions are not from here. Their only wild population is in Gujarat, roughly two thousand kilometres north. The lions at Neyyar were imported into a fenced tract on the edge of a sanctuary that already contained elephant, gaur, sambar, sloth bear, leopard and Nilgiri langur — none of which you are likely to see, because the forest is dense and the animals are not habituated.
In other words the safari park existed to give day visitors a guaranteed animal, precisely because the protected area behind it could not. It was a substitute from the beginning. The empty enclosure is an unusually honest monument to the gap between what a wildlife sanctuary contains and what a ticketed afternoon can promise.
What to do instead
Ask two separate questions at the counter before paying for the circuit: is the safari running today, and are there lions in it. They are not the same question and both have been answered no in recent years.
Then spend the money on the water. The boat trip out onto the reservoir is the substance of this place and always was: an unbroken forest shoreline with the Agasthyamala ridge standing behind it, and the most realistic chance anyone has of seeing elephant, which do come down to drink. The crocodile rehabilitation and breeding centre, established in 1977, is a genuine conservation facility and the mugger crocodiles are reliably there. The deer park is small and quick.
And do not swim, anywhere, under any circumstances. There are crocodiles in this system — the rehabilitation centre is not decorative — and the drawdown banks exposed as the water falls are soft and unstable.
The honest ordering of Neyyar puts the reservoir and the view first and the animal attractions second. That is the reverse of how it is sold, and it makes for a better day.