The monsoon changes Dharmanagar quickly.

Water spreads across the lowlands near Bangladesh’s border with India. Then the lotus appears: first in clusters, then in long stretches of pink and white.

Small wooden boats move between the flowers. Visitors take photographs, trail their hands through the broad leaves or sit quietly as the boats push deeper into the wetland.

For much of the year, Dharmanagar Kalibari Padmabil is an unremarkable wetland in Akhaura, Brahmanbaria. During the rains, it becomes a destination.

And increasingly, a crowded one.

People come from across the country, some with families, others with friends. Boats wait along the bank to carry them into the flowers.

The wetland covers about 120 acres between Akhaura and Kasba upazilas. Tripura lies along its eastern edge. On the Kasba side, part of it is known as Gosaistal Padmabil.

Lotus begins appearing around Ashar, at the start of the Bengali monsoon. By Sraban, the wetland is usually at its most striking. In a good year, the flowers can last until Kartik.

Habibur Rahman heard about the place while visiting relatives in Akhaura and came from Dhaka to see it.

“As soon as I reached the bank, the fragrance of the lotus struck me,” he said.

Azizul Haque was taken by the landscape.

“If I had not come here, I would have missed seeing nature unfold in its own way,” he said.

The real draw, visitors say, is farther out.

“When you take a small dinghy into the middle of the wetland, it feels like another world,” said Ataur Rahman.

The lotus rhizomes can survive underground after the water recedes, producing new plants when the rains return. The plants provide shelter for aquatic life, while their seeds are food for birds.

That ecosystem is now facing a consequence of its popularity. Visitors are picking the flowers. Some pluck them for photographs. Others take them home. One flower makes little difference. Hundreds of visitors doing it every day can.

Local authorities have begun trying to stop them.

Mahabubul Alam Dipak, chairman of Moniond Union Parishad, told Daily Waadaa that hundreds of visitors arrive every morning and afternoon. A local committee has been formed to protect the wetland, and a village police officer has been assigned to the area.

“If visitors do not pick the flowers, this beautiful environment will remain,” he said.

Akhaura Upazila Nirbahi Officer Tapasi Rabeya puts the problem more starkly.

“If a thousand people come every day and each person picks one lotus,” she told Waadaa, “by the tenth day, the person who comes here will not find any flowers.”

Officials have erected signs asking people to leave the flowers alone. Some of the signs, Rabeya said, have themselves disappeared.

Tourism has created another problem.

There are no proper toilets or changing rooms at the wetland, despite visitors often travelling long distances and staying for hours.

Mansur Ahmed, a local resident, wants basic facilities but worries about what could follow. Building too much around the wetland, residents say, could destroy the thing people travel there to see.

Officials are trying to find a middle ground.

Rabeya said a wash block and changing rooms are planned, with the tender already approved. The administration is also consulting environmentalists on protecting the wetland.

For now, there are few permanent structures. Boats remain small. The lotus follows the rains rather than a tourist calendar.

That simplicity is Padmabil’s attraction. It is also what is at stake.

Every monsoon, the water returns and the lotus blooms again. More visitors now know the way.

The challenge is making sure the flowers are still there when the next boat arrives.

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