Travel and Tourism in Tanzania

Serengeti National Park: The Most Famous Wildlife Park in Africa

The Serengeti National Park is one of the oldest and most celebrated protected areas in Africa, and its name has become synonymous in the global imagination with the idea of wild Africa itself. Established as a game reserve in 1929 and as a national park in 1951, the Serengeti was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981 in recognition of its outstanding universal natural value. The park covers approximately 14,750 square kilometers and forms the core of a much larger protected ecosystem that includes the Ngorongoro Conservation Area to the southeast, the Maswa Game Reserve to the southwest, the Grumeti and Ikorongo Game Reserves to the west, and the Loliondo Game Control Area to the northeast — together creating one of the largest and most intact wildlife ecosystems remaining on earth.

The park takes its name from the Maasai word Siringet, meaning endless plain, and the open grassland plains of the southern Serengeti do indeed seem to stretch to infinity in every direction during the rainy season. This vast, open landscape — punctuated by rocky kopje outcrops, acacia groves, and seasonal river systems — is the stage for the greatest wildlife drama on earth and is home to the most spectacular concentration of large mammals anywhere in the world outside of the comparable but smaller ecosystems elsewhere in East and southern Africa.

The Serengeti harbors the Big Five: lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo, and black rhinoceros. Of these, the lions of the Serengeti are perhaps the most significant. The Serengeti supports the largest lion population in Africa — estimates range from approximately 3,000 to 4,000 individuals — making it the most important single population of this species anywhere in the world. Serengeti lions have been the subject of intensive scientific study for decades, and our understanding of lion social behavior, ecology, and genetics owes more to work conducted in the Serengeti than to any other single location. The lions of the Serengeti can be extremely approachable from vehicles, and game drives frequently result in sightings of lions at distances of just a few meters as they rest in the shade, play with cubs, or stalk prey across the open plain.

Leopards are present throughout the Serengeti but are naturally secretive and harder to observe than lions. The best area for leopard sightings in the Serengeti is the Seronera area in the center of the park, where the Seronera River and its gallery of riverine forest and rock outcrops provide perfect leopard habitat. Leopards are frequently seen draping themselves along the branches of large sausage trees or sycamore figs along the Seronera River, especially in the early morning and late afternoon.

Cheetahs are more conspicuous than leopards in the Serengeti, favoring the open short-grass plains where their speed — the fastest of any land animal at up to 120 kilometers per hour over short distances — gives them a hunting advantage. The Ndutu area in the far south and the open plains between Seronera and the Naabi Hill Gate are particularly good for cheetah, especially during the calving season when the abundance of young wildebeest and gazelle provides rich hunting for this elegant but ecologically vulnerable predator.

African wild dogs, one of the most endangered large carnivores in Africa with a continental population of only around 6,600 animals, are present in the Serengeti in small numbers. Sightings are far less predictable than for lion, leopard, or cheetah, but when they occur they rank among the most exciting wildlife encounters available in the park. Wild dogs are extraordinarily efficient pack hunters, capable of running prey to exhaustion over distances of several kilometers, and a wild dog hunt — if witnessed — is one of the most dramatic predator-prey interactions in African wildlife.

Elephants are present in the Serengeti but are not the primary attraction as they are in some other Tanzanian parks. Buffalo are extremely abundant, and herds of several hundred or even several thousand animals are not unusual on the open plains. Black rhinoceros, once more widely distributed, were poached to near-local extinction in the Serengeti during the 1970s and 1980s, and the current small population in the park is closely monitored and protected.

The Serengeti is also extraordinary for birdwatching, with over 500 bird species recorded in the park. Raptors — martial eagle, bateleur, crowned eagle, African hawk-eagle, long-crested eagle, and numerous species of falcon, kestrel, and harrier — are conspicuous above the plains. The oxpeckers that cling to the hides of large mammals removing ticks and parasites, the lilac-breasted rollers that perch on prominent branches flashing their iridescent wings, the yellow-throated longclaws singing from grass stalks, and the extraordinary diversity of weaverbird species constructing their elaborate nests in acacia thorns all contribute to a birding experience that ranks among the finest on the continent.

The Serengeti is divided by most visitors and operators into several zones with distinct wildlife characteristics and best seasons. Seronera, in the center of the park, is the hub of the visitor infrastructure with its airstrip, visitor center, and several lodges. It offers year-round wildlife viewing and is generally considered the best area for big cat sightings at any time of year. The southern Serengeti and Ndutu area, technically within the Ngorongoro Conservation Area but managed in tandem with the park, is the place to be for the calving season from January through March. The northern Serengeti, around the Lobo Wildlife Lodge and the Mara River area near Kogatende camp, is where the Mara River crossings occur from July through October and offers perhaps the most dramatic wildlife viewing in all of Africa during that period. The western Serengeti's Grumeti area provides the Grumeti River crossings from May through July and good year-round wildlife, including large populations of topi antelope, Uganda kob, and western white-bearded wildebeest.

One of the most magical experiences available in the Serengeti is the hot air balloon safari, which operates year-round from several launch sites in the park. Rising silently before dawn, floating over the awakening plain as the first light catches the grass and the wildlife begins to stir below — this is widely described as one of the most spectacular dawn experiences available anywhere in Africa. From the basket of a balloon drifting over the Serengeti, passengers can see for 30 or 40 kilometers in every direction across the endless plain, watch lions on a kill far below, observe a herd of hundreds of elephants moving through the golden morning light, and experience the Serengeti from a perspective utterly different from that of the game drive vehicle. The balloon flight typically concludes with a champagne breakfast laid out in the field by the ground crew.

Photographic safaris are an increasingly important and sophisticated form of wildlife tourism in the Serengeti, and a number of specialist operators offer multi-day photographic itineraries with expert guidance and vehicle setups optimized for wildlife photography, including extended door-less vehicles that allow unobstructed access from multiple angles.

Tarangire National Park: Land of the Ancient Baobabs

Tarangire National Park is one of Tanzania's most underappreciated national parks, and for those who take the time to explore it, it frequently surpasses expectations. Located approximately 120 kilometers southwest of Arusha in the Manyara Region, Tarangire covers approximately 2,850 square kilometers of the Tarangire River basin and the surrounding miombo woodland, acacia savanna, and seasonal swamps.

Tarangire is most famous for two things: its elephants and its baobab trees. During the dry season from June through October, the Tarangire River is the only permanent water source over a vast area, and elephants from across the regional ecosystem converge on the river in extraordinary numbers. Tarangire hosts the largest concentration of elephants of any national park in Tanzania during the dry season, with herds of several hundred animals sometimes gathering around water holes and along the river banks. These are not the stressed, diminished elephant populations found in some overstressed African parks — the Tarangire elephants are large, healthy, and apparently well-adjusted to human presence from vehicles, allowing superb close-range viewing and photography.

The baobab trees of Tarangire are among the most famous and most photographed in East Africa. These extraordinary trees — with their massive, bottle-shaped trunks that can reach up to 30 meters in circumference, their strange upside-down appearance with bare branches resembling roots, and their extraordinary longevity, with some specimens estimated to be over 1,000 years old — are found throughout the park and create a landscape of surreal, prehistoric character. The largest baobabs in Tarangire are enormous organisms, their trunks hollow with age and large enough for several people to stand inside, their bark scarred by centuries of elephant tusk scraping. Viewed at sunset, with their bizarre silhouettes against an orange Tanzanian sky and elephants grazing at their bases, the baobabs of Tarangire create some of the most iconic landscape imagery in all of Africa.

Beyond elephants and baobabs, Tarangire offers excellent game viewing for all the major species including lion, leopard, cheetah, wild dog, buffalo, zebra, giraffe, wildebeest, hartebeest, eland, oryx, and numerous smaller antelope species. The park is particularly good for birdwatching — the Tarangire ecosystem supports over 550 bird species, including the ashy starling found nowhere else in the world and large populations of yellow-collared lovebird, red and yellow barbet, and various hornbills.

Tarangire has the distinct advantage of receiving far fewer visitors than the Serengeti or Ngorongoro, meaning that game drives are uncrowded and it is frequently possible to be alone with a wildlife sighting without other vehicles present. This relative lack of visitor pressure makes it an excellent choice for travelers who want a high-quality wildlife experience with more solitude than the most famous parks offer.

Lake Manyara National Park: Drama and Flamingos

Lake Manyara National Park, located about 130 kilometers west of Arusha near the town of Mto wa Mbu, is a small but remarkably beautiful and diverse park that occupies the floor of the Rift Valley between the dramatic escarpment walls and the shore of Lake Manyara. Despite covering only about 330 square kilometers — a fraction of the size of the Serengeti or Tarangire — Lake Manyara punches well above its weight as a wildlife destination.

The park is most famous internationally for its tree-climbing lions, a behavioral anomaly in which the lions of Manyara regularly rest in the upper branches of large acacia and sycamore fig trees, sometimes at heights of 6 to 8 meters above the ground. This behavior, which is also seen to a lesser extent in the lions of the Ishasha sector of Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National Park, is thought to result from a combination of factors including the desire to escape ground-level insects and the ability to access the cool breezes of the tree canopy in the midday heat. Whether it is a cultural tradition passed from generation to generation within certain prides or an independently developed response to local conditions is a matter of continuing scientific interest. Sightings of tree-climbing lions are not guaranteed at Manyara but are sufficiently frequent to make them a realistic expectation.

The lake itself is a shallow, alkaline soda lake that in favorable conditions supports enormous populations of both greater and lesser flamingo. At peak numbers, the flamingo flocks at Lake Manyara can number in the hundreds of thousands, turning the lake shore pink for kilometers and creating one of the most visually dramatic bird spectacles in Africa. Populations fluctuate significantly depending on rainfall and the lake's alkalinity, but at virtually any time of year some flamingos are present.

The groundwater forest at the base of the escarpment at the northern end of the park is a dense, lush forest fed by springs from the escarpment wall above, creating a zone of extraordinary richness that supports large troops of olive baboon and vervet monkey, impressive herds of elephant and buffalo, giraffe, impala, and exceptional birdwatching with green-backed heron, crowned hornbill, silvery-cheeked hornbill, and numerous forest birds. Hippos inhabit the alkaline water of the lake's northern bays in considerable numbers.

Lake Manyara was designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1981, reflecting its significance as an ecosystem containing multiple distinct habitat types — groundwater forest, acacia woodland, alkaline lake, and reed-bed — within a relatively small area. For visitors doing the northern Tanzania circuit, Manyara makes an excellent half-day or full-day stop between Arusha and either Tarangire or the Ngorongoro highlands.

Ruaha National Park: Wild Tanzania

Ruaha National Park, located in south-central Tanzania, is the largest national park in Tanzania and one of the largest in Africa, covering approximately 20,226 square kilometers. It is part of a broader ecosystem — the Rungwa-Ruaha ecosystem — that together with surrounding game reserves and controlled areas covers more than 45,000 square kilometers, making it among the largest and least disturbed wildlife ecosystems in East Africa.

Ruaha receives far fewer visitors than the northern circuit parks — perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 visitors annually compared to hundreds of thousands at the Serengeti — which means that wildlife encounters in Ruaha have an intimacy and exclusivity that is increasingly difficult to find in the more heavily visited parks. The landscape of Ruaha is distinctly different from the northern parks: dryer, more rugged, dominated by the Great Ruaha River and its associated thickets of tamarind, acacia, and Combretum woodland, with rocky hills rising above the river plain and enormous baobabs scattered throughout the bush.

Ruaha is famous above all for its elephants. The park harbors the largest elephant population in East Africa, with estimates suggesting between 10,000 and 15,000 individuals in the broader Ruaha-Rungwa ecosystem. Encounters with elephant herds at the Ruaha River in the dry season are extraordinary, with hundreds of animals coming to drink and play in the river shallows simultaneously. The Ruaha elephants are large and impressive, and the relative lack of heavy poaching in recent decades means that many bulls retain large tusks — a sight increasingly rare in heavily poached areas elsewhere in Africa.

Ruaha is also exceptional for lions and wild dogs. The park supports one of the strongest lion populations in Tanzania outside the Serengeti-Mara system, with multiple large prides and impressive males. African wild dogs, one of Africa's most endangered large predators, are significantly more commonly encountered in Ruaha than in most other Tanzanian parks, and the park has become one of the best places in East Africa to see and photograph wild dog packs in action. The dogs' hunting style — long, relentless pursuit at moderate speeds until prey is exhausted — is best observed on the open river flats and short grass areas of the park.

Access to Ruaha requires either a charter flight — several operators offer scheduled charter services from Dar es Salaam or from the northern circuit parks — or a long road drive from the town of Iringa. The relative remoteness is part of the appeal, and the handful of excellent camps and lodges in the park offer some of the most authentic and uncrowded bush experiences available in Tanzania.

The Seven UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Tanzania

Tanzania's seven UNESCO World Heritage Sites are among the most remarkable on the African continent and reflect the extraordinary diversity of the country's natural, cultural, and historical assets. These seven sites together tell the story of Tanzania from the dawn of human evolution to the pinnacle of medieval Indian Ocean civilization, from the most spectacular volcanic landscapes in Africa to one of the finest examples of Swahili urban architecture in the world.

The Ngorongoro Conservation Area was inscribed in 1979 as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, making it one of the earliest sites in Africa to receive this recognition. Its designation reflects both its extraordinary natural significance — the volcanic landscapes, the crater ecosystem, the wildlife — and its paleoanthropological importance as the location of Olduvai Gorge and the Laetoli footprints. The area's unique status as a UNESCO site recognized for both natural and cultural universal outstanding value reflects the unusual combination of biological richness and archaeological and living cultural significance contained within its boundaries.

The Serengeti National Park was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981, recognized for its outstanding universal natural value as the site of the Great Migration — the largest overland mammal migration on earth — and for harboring one of the most diverse and intact large mammal communities on the planet. The Serengeti's listing was one of the most important early applications of the World Heritage Convention to protect a site whose universal significance lay primarily in its exceptional ecological processes and biological diversity rather than geological or scenographic values.

The Ruins of Kilwa Kisiwani and Ruins of Songo Mnara were jointly inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981, recognized as outstanding examples of Swahili coastal architectural heritage and as the physical remains of one of the most important commercial civilizations of the medieval world. Kilwa Kisiwani's Great Mosque and Husuni Kubwa palace are the principal monuments at the site, while Songo Mnara, a small island just south of Kilwa Kisiwani, preserves the ruins of a large residential and commercial town of the 14th and 15th centuries.

The Selous Game Reserve, renamed Nyerere National Park in 2019 in honor of Tanzania's founding father, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982. At approximately 50,000 square kilometers, it is one of the largest protected wildlife areas in the world and was for many decades one of the most important refuges for large mammals in Africa. The site has faced severe challenges from poaching, particularly of elephants and black rhinos, in recent decades, leading to its placement on the UNESCO List of World Heritage in Danger in 2014.

Kilimanjaro National Park was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, recognized for the outstanding natural beauty of Africa's highest mountain and its extraordinary sequence of ecological zones from tropical forest to arctic summit. The mountain's glaciers, though retreating rapidly, are specifically mentioned in the UNESCO citation as part of the mountain's outstanding universal value.

The Stone Town of Zanzibar was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000, recognized as an outstanding example of the Swahili coastal trading town and for its extraordinary architectural heritage reflecting the fusion of Arab, Persian, Indian, African, and European influences that converged on Zanzibar during the height of the Omani sultanate. Stone Town represents the most complete and best-preserved example of this architectural tradition in East Africa.

The Kondoa Rock-Art Sites were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006, recognized as an outstanding example of prehistoric rock art that provides a unique insight into the lives and beliefs of the hunter-gatherer peoples of East Africa from the Later Stone Age through recent millennia. The Kondoa rock paintings are among the most extensive and best-preserved in East Africa, and their continuing spiritual significance to local communities adds a living cultural dimension to their archaeological value.

Pemba Island and Mafia Island: Diving Treasures

Beyond the main island of Unguja, the Zanzibar Archipelago contains two additional major islands that are among the finest marine destinations in all of East Africa. Pemba Island, lying approximately 80 kilometers north of Zanzibar City, is often described as offering the best diving in East Africa. The waters around Pemba benefit from the full force of the Indian Ocean current as it sweeps around the island's eastern shore, creating upwellings of cold, nutrient-rich water that support spectacular walls and pinnacles covered in soft corals, gorgonian sea fans, and enormous barrel sponges. The diversity of fish life around Pemba is extraordinary, including schools of pelagic species, manta rays, hammerhead sharks, napoleon wrasse, and the extraordinary diversity of reef fish that characterize healthy Indo-Pacific coral ecosystems. Pemba is accessible by light aircraft from Zanzibar City or by ferry, and a small number of dive lodges offer basic but comfortable accommodation combined with excellent diving.

Mafia Island, lying about 160 kilometers south of Zanzibar near the mouth of the Rufiji River delta, is even less visited than Pemba and is surrounded by what are arguably the healthiest coral reefs in the western Indian Ocean. The Mafia Island Marine Park, established in 1995, covers approximately 822 square kilometers and protects coral reefs, seagrass beds, and mangrove forests of exceptional quality. Whale sharks are predictably present off Mafia from October through March, feeding on the plankton-rich waters influenced by the Rufiji River outflow. The snorkeling and diving encounters with these gentle giants — the largest fish in the sea, reaching up to 12 meters in length — are among the most moving wildlife experiences available in Tanzania's waters. Mafia is accessible by light aircraft from Dar es Salaam, and a small number of eco-lodges offer comfortable accommodation in a setting that feels genuinely remote and undiscovered.

Selous Game Reserve and Nyerere National Park

The Selous Game Reserve, recently renamed Nyerere National Park after Tanzania's founding father Julius Nyerere, is one of the largest protected wildlife areas in the world. Covering approximately 50,000 square kilometers, it is larger than the entire country of Switzerland. It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982 and remained for many decades one of Africa's most important wildlife sanctuaries.

The Selous is a landscape of extraordinary beauty: the Rufiji River, one of the largest river systems in East Africa, flows through the northern part of the reserve in a complex delta of channels, oxbow lakes, and papyrus swamps, surrounded by open miombo woodland, borassus palm groves, and riverine forest. The wildlife includes large elephant herds, hippos in the river in extraordinary numbers, crocodiles, wild dog, lion, leopard, African painted dog, sable antelope, and an exceptional diversity of birds.

The park has unfortunately suffered severely from elephant poaching in recent decades, with the elephant population declining from an estimated 120,000 in the early 1970s to fewer than 15,000 in recent surveys. This catastrophic decline led to the site's placement on UNESCO's List of World Heritage in Danger in 2014. Conservation organizations and the Tanzanian government have made significant efforts to combat poaching in recent years, with some evidence of improvement. The renaming to Nyerere National Park in 2019 was intended in part to signal a new era of commitment to the area's protection.

The Selous/Nyerere area is notable for offering some of the finest boat safaris in Africa on the Rufiji River and its lakes, as well as walking safaris that give access to the bush on foot — both experiences that are unavailable or restricted in most northern Tanzanian parks. Boat safaris on the Rufiji allow close-up encounters with hippos, crocodiles, fish eagles, kingfishers, herons, and elephants drinking at the riverbank in a completely different register from the standard game drive experience.