BR Hills Wildlife Sanctuary
The Biligiriranga Hills Tiger Reserve, an ecologically rare transition zone between the Western and Eastern Ghats, and ancestral home of the indigenous Soliga tribal community.
The Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple Wildlife Sanctuary, popularly known as BR Hills, occupies a rare biogeographic junction where the Western and Eastern Ghats meet, allowing plant and animal species from both mountain systems to coexist in a single forest tract. This convergence gives the sanctuary an unusually high level of biodiversity for its size, and it was upgraded to a tiger reserve in 2011 in recognition of its ecological importance.
BR Hills is also the ancestral homeland of the Soliga people, an indigenous community whose traditional ecological knowledge and forest rights were the subject of a landmark 2011 legal recognition — one of the first instances in India of a tribal community’s rights being formally acknowledged within a tiger reserve. The Soliga continue to live within and around the sanctuary, and the hilltop temple to Rangaswamy (a form of Vishnu) that gives the hills their name remains an active pilgrimage site they help maintain.
Getting there: BR Hills is reached via Yelandur from Chamarajanagar; the BR Hills Post Office serves the hill settlement near the temple.
The site itself
Where to get your stamp cancelled
This may not be next to the site itself — some post offices serve several nearby landmarks.
- Post office
- BR Hills Post Office
- Pincode
- 571441
- Address
- BR Hills Post Office, Biligiri Rangana Hills, Yelandur Taluk, Chamarajanagar District, Karnataka
Sources
- Project maintainer transcription of the physical Philately Passport booklet (district/landmark/post office list)
- B R Hills Post Office pincode record