Sanjay Gandhi National Park
— — a forest the city grew around.
Not only on a wall.
“A green block of forest, lake, and Buddhist cave shrines folded into the northern edge of Mumbai. About 104 square kilometres of protected land inside one of the world's densest cities. Leopards still range here, sometimes crossing into the surrounding suburbs at night. The Kanheri rock-cut viharas, carved between the first century BCE and the tenth century CE, sit deep in the park.
Sanjay Gandhi National Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Sanjay Gandhi National Park covers about 104 square kilometres at the northern end of Mumbai, in the suburbs of Borivali and Thane. It is one of the few national parks held entirely within a major city's municipal limits, bordered on every side by dense urban development. The park protects mixed deciduous forest, two reservoirs that supply parts of the city, and a small but genuine population of leopards. The Maharashtra Forest Department administers the park, with main entry at Borivali East and a connecting road system that has been in place since the 1970s.
The Kanheri Caves rise on a basalt ridge near the centre of the park, a complex of 109 rock-cut Buddhist viharas and chaityas carved between roughly the first century BCE and the tenth century CE. They were part of an active monastic route between the western coast and the Deccan trade towns. Cave 3, the great chaitya, holds a stupa about five metres tall under a vaulted ceiling cut from solid rock. Many of the smaller cells still have their original stone benches and water cisterns.
The park functions as Mumbai's largest green lung. On winter mornings, when the city's coastal smog settles, the forest interior reads markedly cleaner; bird counts are highest before eight. Resident leopards — recent camera-trap studies estimate around forty individual cats — move primarily at dawn and dusk along the forest edge, which is also where the park backs onto residential blocks. The coexistence has held, with friction, for decades. The Maharashtra Forest Department runs ongoing community outreach in the bordering neighbourhoods.