Sagarmatha National Parkसगरमाथा राष्ट्रिय निकुञ्ज

Sagarmatha National Park is the roof of the world made into a protected area. Established on 19 July 1976 with New Zealand assistance, it climbs from 2,845 m at Monjo to the 8,848 m summit of Mount Everest (Sagarmatha) across 1,148 km² of the high Khumbu, with a 275 km² buffer zone added in January 2002. In 1979 it became the first natural UNESCO World Heritage Site in Nepal.

This is glaciers, moraine and high alpine pasture rather than jungle, and its wildlife is adapted to the thin air: snow leopard above about 3,500 m, Himalayan tahr, musk deer and Himalayan black bear, with 208 recorded bird species including the Impeyan pheasant (danphe, Nepal's national bird), the bearded vulture and the Himalayan snowcock, set among more than a thousand plant species.

The park is inseparable from the Sherpa people whose villages, monasteries and yak pastures form a living cultural landscape, and from the Everest Base Camp trekking and mountaineering economy that draws tens of thousands each year. Managing world-class adventure tourism against the fragility of a high-alpine ecosystem — waste, firewood demand, glacial change — is the park's central balancing act.