Environmental protection and tourism: tourism in the protected area in Mongolia

Mongolia is a unique and relatively unexplored tourism and leisure travel destination. In the world tourism market, the tourism sector offers a great combination of wild natural features, a wide variety of untouched landscapes, historical heritage reserves, and nomadic life style and culture. The Protected Area Network of Mongolia cover over 14.5 percent of the country's territory and has become major destinations for rapidly growing tourism and recreational activities for its natural beauty, rare species of wildlife and historical and cultural heritage sites. Orkhon valley National Park (OVNP) is one of Mongolian main tourism destinations regarding to natural beautiful landscape and including numerous cultural and historical remains and sites. Thus, promoting sustainable tourism development to improve local livelihoods based on the nomadic lifestyle and protection of land with natural wilderness, watersheds, important biodiversity, historical and cultural heritage and rare remains is challenging in the national park.