Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

The tropical Indian Ocean is home to the Spice Islands. Characterised by beautiful sandy beaches, fringing coral reefs and coastal mangrove forests, this is a vibrant nursery area for marine life, such as whale sharks, crabs, seahorses and a great variety of fish. The coastal areas are where humans have the most direct impact on the ocean's resources.

Most people hope they'll live a long, healthy, and happy life, but few are able to travel the world in an attempt to reverse-engineer the formula for longevity. That's exactly what Dan Buettner did: Beginning in the early aughts, Buettner collaborated with National Geographic, scouring the globe in pursuit of places where people live much longer than average, and thus, the concept of 'Blue Zones' came to be.
In the first episode, how can people live so long and with such great health? A trip to Okinawa reveals simple secrets about diet, lifestyle and longevity. They maintain a sense of purpose no matter what age and you won't find them laying on the sofa.

Fly across iridescent tropical reefs, brush through a cloud of a million jellyfish, visit an alien world where the closer you look, the more you see, where the tiniest creatures support the greatest predators... We think of reefs as exotic, distant places with little or no connection to our everyday world. Yet every reef is a living city beneath the sea with a parallel existence to ours, distant yet undeniably connected. Reefs are hotspots of biodiversity as vital to life on earth as the rain-forests. They have been shaping our shorelines, literally forming islands and mountains, for millions of years. The fossil record shows that given time they have recovered from all of earth's major extinction events. Even reefs pulverised by atomic blasts at Bikini Atoll have regenerated. Yet within our lifetime reefs have come to face their greatest threat...

After a small plane crashes, four indigenous children struggle to survive in the Colombian Amazon jungle, relying on ancestral wisdom as an unprecedented rescue mission unfolds amid the jungle's challenges. Directed by Oscar winner Orlando von Einsiedel, this documentary tells the incredible story from the point of view of those involved in this epic rescue: the children's family, indigenous communities and leaders, and the Colombian army.

The sparkling blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea are home to over 700 varieties of fish and almost 10 per cent of the world's marine species. Its coastline is one of the most densely populated in the world and the human pressure on this sea is magnified each summer with the influx of holiday makers. Western civilisation developed around these shores but now human activity is having a profound effect on this endangered sea.

From lush cloud forests to bare summits that take your breath away, the higher you climb the tougher life gets on a mountain. Human Planet explores the extraordinary ways in which people survive at extreme altitudes where nature becomes utterly unforgiving. In the Altai Mountains in Western Mongolia the vast open spaces make hunting for animals almost impossible, so the locals have forged an astonishing partnership with golden eagles which can do the hunting for them. On the precipitous cliffs of the Simien Mountains of Ethiopia we join a young boy locked in a dramatic battle with fearsome gelada monkeys which are hell-bent on raiding his family's meagre grain harvest. In the Himalayan state of Nepal - the roof of the world - we witness a rarely seen ceremony: a sky burial. In a land where there is little wood to burn for cremation, and where burying the dead is virtually impossible, the dead are fed to vultures in the ultimate reverence of nature.