Thousand Camel Festival in Mongolia
The Thousand Camel Festival is organized to improve the breed of the camels and to increase the number of the herd. Tourists take great interest in this festival. One team of each village from festival organizing province participates in the festival. The main objective of the camel festival is to increase the number of the rare Bactrian camels and to raise awareness among the people. This also attracted the interest of many local and foreign tourists, making this one of the biggest events in the Mongolian tourism sector. There are only 844.450 Bactrian camels left in the world and 430.000 of which is in Mongolia.
Two significant events related to the Bactrian camel, nicknamed the elephant of the Gobi desert, occurred at the end of 2015 and early 2016. One of them being “Coaxing Ritual for Baby Camels” has been inscribed in the UNESCO List of Heritage during the 10th regular session of UNESCO, organized in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia from 30th of November to 4th of December 2015. The second one being Thousand camel races, took place in Dalanzadgad city of the Umnugobi province on 7th and 8th of March 2016, was registered in the Guinness World Record Book.
