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# An hour from Darwin, a national park almost nobody has heard of
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/nino-konis-santana/
- Published: 2026-09-05T19:55:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-05T21:36:16.000Z
- Description: Timor-Leste's Nino Konis Santana National Park has just become the country's first UNESCO biosphere reserve. It has rainforest, a sacred island, cave paintings and Coral Triangle reefs, and almost nobody outside Timor has heard of it.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Explore, All stories

*Celebrating all of our amazing fathers this Father's Day, with love from all of us at Earth to Sea News.*

Fly a little over an hour north from Darwin and you land in Dili, and at the far eastern tip of the country, in Lautém, sits a park that covers the whole end of the island and the sea beyond it. Nino Konis Santana National Park was declared in 2007, Timor-Leste's first, and in June this year UNESCO named it the country's first biosphere reserve, one of fourteen added around the world on World Environment Day. It holds the largest remaining stretch of primary forest in the country, limestone cliffs, and Lake Ira Lalaro, the biggest freshwater lake in Timor, and its birdlife runs to about two hundred species, ten of them found nowhere but Timor, including the critically endangered yellow crested cockatoo. Offshore, the reefs belong to the Coral Triangle, the patch of ocean with more kinds of coral and reef fish than anywhere on Earth.

At the very end of the road is Tutuala, a Fataluku village on the cliffs, and below it Valu Beach, where local fishermen will run you across a narrow strait to Jaco Island. Jaco is sacred to the Fataluku, so nobody lives there and nobody stays the night: you go for the day, snorkel off a beach of white sand into water that is startlingly clear, and come back before dark. Nearby, the cave paintings at Ile Kere Kere look out from the cliffs over the same sea. Antonio da Silva, Timor-Leste's Director General of Tourism, calls the UNESCO recognition a proud moment for the country, and it is the kind of place this section exists for: little known, full of nature, and run by the people who live there. Go gently, book local guides through Tutuala, and take your rubbish home.

Sources and links

Our short take: from UNESCO's announcement of fourteen new biosphere reserves (5 June 2026) and the Timor-Leste Ministry of Tourism's statement via the Pacific Tourism Organisation (15 June 2026), with park details from the national tourism site. No named operators or stays, so no reputation check was needed. Photograph: Josep M. Gracia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

- [UNESCO: the fourteen new biosphere reserves](https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/unesco-designates-14-new-biosphere-reserves-world-environment-day)Timor-Leste, Aruba and Montenegro get their first.
- [Timor-Leste tourism: the national park](https://www.timorleste.tl/destinations/national-park/)How to get to Tutuala and Jaco.