The dramatic increase in protected areas worldwide and their use as sites of nature‐based tourism has provoked many postcolonial analyses of protected areas. This paper reviews the critical literature on protected areas, including the literatures that analyse the implication of tourism in legitimating protected areas. This paper employs a historical analysis of the use and creation of protected areas to problematise a strict postcolonial reading of protected areas and proposes the metageography of enclavisation as a new lens though which to analyse protected areas. This paper argues that treating protected areas as inter‐connected, ‘globalised’ enclaves comports with other developments within political geography (such as territorialisation and land grabbing) and opens up new possibilities for understanding the spatialities of protected areas.