About the park
Ruaha National Park: Tanzania's wild south
Second-largest national park in Tanzania and East Africa, twice the size of the Serengeti's core, with a fraction of its visitors. Here's what makes Ruaha different, and why so few people know it.
A park the size of a small country
At 20,226 km², Ruaha is the second-largest national park in Tanzania and East Africa (only Nyerere, gazetted in 2019, is bigger). It anchors the vast Rungwa–Kizigo–Muhesi ecosystem of more than 45,000 km², one of Africa's great intact wilderness blocks.
The numbers that matter most, though, are visitor numbers: Ruaha receives on the order of tens of thousands of visitors a year, against hundreds of thousands in the Serengeti. On most game drives outside the core riverfront, yours will be the only vehicle in sight.
Where two Africas meet
Ruaha sits precisely on the convergence zone of East African acacia savanna and Southern African miombo woodland. That accident of geography gives it wildlife combinations found nowhere else: greater and lesser kudu side by side, sable and roan antelope at the eastern edge of their range, and a bird list drawing from both halves of the continent.
The landscape is instantly recognisable: rolling hills studded with ancient baobabs, granite kopjes, and the sand rivers (Mwagusi, Mdonya and Jongomero) that act as the park's game-viewing arteries.
A short history
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1910 | Gazetted as the Saba Game Reserve under German administration |
| 1946 | Renamed Rungwa Game Reserve under British administration |
| 1964 | Southern portion gazetted as Ruaha National Park |
| 1974 | South-eastern extension added |
| 2008 | Usangu Game Reserve and wetlands added, nearly doubling the park |
The river that names the park
The Great Ruaha River runs along the park's south-eastern edge and is its ecological heart: in the dry season virtually everything (elephant, buffalo, lion and hippo) orbits its pools. The river's dry-season flow has declined since the 1990s due to upstream irrigation, a challenge conservationists are actively working on; for visitors, the concentration of life around the remaining water is the park's defining spectacle.
Park headquarters sits at Msembe, on the rift-valley floor near the river, with the main airstrip alongside.