Nijhum Dwip

Nijhum Dwip is a cluster of chars that rose from the shallow Meghna estuary beginning in the early 1950s, formed by river silt building up in the Bay of Bengal south of Hatiya's main island. It now covers roughly 163 km² in total, about 39 km² of it dry land, and is administered as its own union of Hatiya Upazila even though reaching it means a further boat crossing from Hatiya's main island.

The island wasn't always called Nijhum Dwip. Hatiya's fishermen had been using the newly formed chars as seasonal camps since the 1940s, and their earliest name for it — Ichamoti Dwip, roughly "the island of prawns" — came from the abundant shrimp in the surrounding shallows. As sand kept accreting, settlers took to calling it Baluar Char ("sandbar of accreted sand"), and it was also known for a time as Char Osman, after Osman, an early settler said to have arrived with his herd of buffalo and given the island his name. A formal land survey in 1959–60 brought the first permanent settlers, and in the mid-1970s the then-minister Amirul Islam renamed it Nijhum Dwip — "the Silent Island" — struck by how still and isolated it felt compared to the mainland. The name stuck, and it's the one that eventually made the island famous.

A Forest Department afforestation programme begun in 1974 planted roughly 9,000 acres of keora, gewa, kankra, bain and babul across the island's north, turning bare char into dense mangrove and coastal woodland. Four pairs of spotted deer (chital) released into that forest in 1978 have since grown into a population estimated at around 5,000, alongside wild boar, fishing cats, rhesus macaques and clawless otters; more than 35 bird species use the island in winter, and dolphins and sea turtles are regularly seen in the surrounding water. On 8 April 2001 the government declared roughly 40,390 acres of the island a National Park, and in 2019 the surrounding waters became the Nijhum Dwip Marine Protected Area.

What draws visitors is the combination: herds of chital graze right at the treeline and are unusually unafraid of people, especially around dawn along the road through Soalakia, making close-up wildlife sightings possible without a guide or expensive gear. Namar Bazar Sea Beach, a short walk from the main town, is the most visited stretch of sand; further east, quieter beaches sometimes nicknamed "Virgin Beach" and the sandbar of Komolar Dwip offer the same coastline without the crowds. A roughly 800-metre wooden bridge crosses a tidal creek on the island's edge, giving an open view over the Meghna where it meets the bay. Winter through early spring — October to mid-April — is the best window to visit, when the weather is driest and migratory birds are present.

Nijhum Dwip is being talked about more each year as one of Bangladesh's rising ecotourism destinations, and visitor numbers, guesthouses and boat services have grown accordingly — the Bangladesh Parjatan Corporation runs a hotel on the island, alongside a number of private resorts and Forest Department rest houses. That growth sits alongside the same pressures the rest of the Meghna estuary faces: as a low, young char island, Nijhum Dwip is exposed to the erosion and storm risk documented on the Natural Disasters page, and the more visitors it draws, the more its future depends on tourism staying small-scale and forest-friendly rather than crowding out the wildlife and quiet that made the island worth visiting in the first place.