Lopburi
Khmer temple city colonized by 3,000 sacred macaques—COVID tourism collapse triggered population crisis, 2024 mass sterilization. Also Thailand's largest sunflower fields.
Lopburi's 3,000 macaques are a population ecology lesson in real time. The long-tailed monkeys colonized the 13th-century Khmer temples centuries ago—locals consider them descendants of Hanuman, granting them tolerance no ordinary pest would receive. When tourists arrived, the monkeys fed on their handouts; the population grew accordingly. Then COVID-19 removed the tourists, and hungry primates invaded homes and businesses with unprecedented aggression. By 2024, the government was trapping and neutering 1,600 of them.
The Khmer presence here is older than the monkeys. In the 10th century, Lopburi was absorbed into the expanding Khmer Empire, which valued the city for its position on trade routes to the Kra Isthmus. Phra Prang Sam Yot—the "Monkey Temple"—rises as three stone towers symbolizing Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, built by rulers who never imagined their sanctuary would become primate habitat. Each November, the Monkey Buffet Festival stages elaborate fruit offerings; in 2025, the spectacle runs November 29-30.
Beyond the simians, Lopburi hosts Thailand's largest sunflower fields—vast yellow expanses in Phatthana Nikom district, blooming November through January. A new railway station, Lopburi 2, opened December 5, 2025, routing faster trains to this province where the sacred and commensal blur into one chaotic tourism economy.