Two zones of Yala National Park have been closed to the public from today until 15 October, the Department of Wildlife Conservation has announced, NewsFirst reported.
Director General Ranjan Marasinghe said Zones One and Two — the blocks that carry the overwhelming majority of Yala’s visitor traffic — are being closed temporarily because of the prevailing dry weather. The park’s remaining zones stay open to visitors.
Why the closure matters
Blocks 1 and 2 are the park’s leopard-viewing core and its commercial centre; closing them for a month removes most of what draws visitors to Yala at all. The stated reason is animal welfare rather than visitor safety: in drought, animals concentrate around the few remaining waterholes, and jeep traffic at those points adds stress to animals already under it.
The timing places the closure inside Sri Lanka’s worst dry spell in years. The Meteorology Department has put the probability of a strong El Niño at 98% within three months and has described the developing event as potentially the strongest in 75 years, with more than 160,000 people affected across eight districts.
Wildlife has been visibly affected. The Department of Wildlife Conservation has been trucking bowser water into parks to keep waterholes supplied, and waterfalls and tanks have run dry in the hill country, including Ellegala in Udadumbara.
An annual measure, not an emergency one
Yala’s main blocks are closed most years for a seasonal break, historically around September and October, so a closure at this date is not itself unusual. What is specific this year is the reason given: NewsFirst attributes it directly to dry weather conditions rather than to the routine annual schedule.
The park is also under separate pressure from enforcement problems, with arrests for poaching and for off-track driving by safari jeeps recorded earlier this year.
Not reported
NewsFirst’s report is three sentences. It does not say whether the closure is the routine annual break brought forward or an additional measure, whether bookings already made for the period will be refunded or transferred to the open zones, or what the closure costs operators and the department in entrance revenue.
On the last of those questions — whether any other national park faces closure for the same reason — the Daily Mirror subsequently reported that the Wildlife Department is not ruling out further closures if the heat and dry conditions intensify, though none has been closed so far. That report also puts a figure on what is at stake: Yala alone earned about Rs. 2.10 billion of the Rs. 4.28 billion national parks took in entrance and related fees in the first half of 2026.
Ada Derana carried the same announcement, describing the areas as Blocks 1 and 2 rather than “Zones One and Two” and giving the same 14 September to 15 October window. Its article could not be retrieved — the site has returned a CloudFront 403 block to every fetch attempt for several weeks — so it is not cited here. No other verified newsroom had filed on the closure at the time of writing.
