Tsingy Rouge

The Tsingy de Bemaraha typically tops every traveler’s list of sites to visit in Madagascar. Inscribed by UNESCO, the focus of many geological studies, and even depicted in the film Madagascar as an impassable landscape, the Great Tsingy, as it is often called, certainly deserves the attention. It was even listed as one of Atlas Obscura’s Places to Wander in 2024.

But Madagascar also boasts a smaller, more obscure site in the north that contains a strikingly similar landscape.

It also happens to be red.

Located in the far north of the island nation, Tsingy Rouge lies well off Madagascar’s typical tourist radar. Far from the capital of Antananarivo and the famous lemurs of the eastern rainforests, few visitors venture here. 

The fin-like spires may look like simple clay, but they are actually a combination of calcified mud and iron-rich red laterite, giving them their distinctive color and a consistency similar to concrete, making them resistant to the eroding forces of wind and rain. While the Grand Tsingy is often described as razor sharp, the towers of the Tsingy Rouge are more like serrated steak knives. 

Sharp, but not in a cut-your-hand-off kind of way.

Still, please don’t touch. 

Although the Tsingy Rouge was likely revealed due to a human-created combination of slash and burn deforestation and the resulting landslides, the spires are more delicate than their limestone cousins in the Grand Tsingy. 

And we don’t want to add insult to injury, do we?