National Parks in Tanzania

Southern parks

Katdvi National Park

In this rarely visited treasure, the country’s third largest park, you’ll have nature to yourself and experience the Africa of days gone by. In the dry season herds of wildlife so large they’re beyond imagining concentrate around the Katuma River, and in the rainy season, the park’s marshy lakes trill with birdlife and bristle with hippos and crocodiles.

Kitulo National Park

The Serengeti of Flowers, this park’s plateau, is a not of orchids, geraniums, lobelias, lilies, and the brilliant flowers of the red-hot poker plants. Birds, butterflies, lizards, and chameleons add their own rich sights and sounds to what locals call the Garden of the Gods.

Mikumi National Park

Sitting at the heart of a 47,000-Square-mile wilderness, this easily accessible park is a game-viewing paradise. Lions rule here, and prey for them is plentiful—zebras, wildebeests, impalas, elands, and hippos. Migrating flocks of birds fill the skies in the rainy season, but in any season, you’ll find the animals here as unforgettable as the park itself.

Ruaha National Park

Wildlife and scenery make this new park, the largest in Tanzania, a perfect safari setting. Rivers patrolled by crocodiles splice the park’s woodlands and grasslands, home to the great African hoofed animals—including the park’s famous greater kudu—and Its huge elephant herds.

Udzungwa Mountains National Park

The forest primeval beckons with all its enchantments in Udzungwa. This is the largest and most biodiverse area in the famous chain of mountains known as the Eastern Arc. Hike its sun-dappled trails and you’ll revel in the lushness and wildlife, including two kinds of primates—a red colobus monkey and crested mangabey.

Western parks

Gombe National Park

Everyone knows about this park’s loudest residents—the chimpanzees made famous by Jane Goodall. But when you walk into its ancient forests you’ll be charmed by its other denizens as well: olive baboons, colobus monkeys and an endless variety of birds.

Mahale Mountains National Park

In this remote and rare enclave, the majesty of the Mahale Mountains meets the blue waters of Tanganyika—the world’s longest and cleanest freshwater lake Cruise across ,  then climb into the mountains’ folds, and you’ll be in the land of the chimpanzee, now a vanishing breed in Africa’s wilds.

Rubondo Island National Park

Rising from the southwest corner of Lake Victoria, this island idyll overlooks a vast aquatic kingdom filled with huge fish—the Nile perch—stealthy crocodiles, and a strange water antelope, the sitatunga. A blizzard of birds wheels through the skies, and the smells of wild jasmine and orchids scent the air.

Eastern park

Saadani National Park

The sea casts its spell over Saadani, home to a stunningly diverse coastal rain forest and the ruins of the historic port that gave the park its name. Both onshore and off, wildlife reign, from the grazing buffalo, waterbuck, reedbuck, and warthogs of the savanna to the humpbacks and green turtles of the sea.

Northern parks

Arusha National Park

Though it’s too often overlooked by safari enthusiasts, Arusha is a wonderful place to visit. You’ll find all kinds of animals here: colobus and blue monkeys as well as turacos and trogon birds. Keep an eye out for leopards and spotted hyenas, and don’t miss the buffalo and warthogs that graze the marshy floor of stunning Ngurdoto Crater.

Kilimanjaro National Park

The jewel in the continental crown, Mount Kilimanjaro rises almost 20,000 feet in solitary splendor. Though it is the world’s highest freestanding mountain, its slopes will welcome you as you make your way through lush woodlands and fantastical forests of giant heather and lobelia to reach the summit—an icy, exhilarating victory you’ll never forget.

Lake Manyara National Park

The Rift Valley, a classic jungle patrolled by troops of baboons and monkeys, a grand flamingo-filled lakeshore, and the distant blue of volcanic peaks—no wonder Ernest Hemingway called this setting “the loveliest” he had seen in Africa. And its circuit road makes it easy to see the grazing buffalo, zebras, and giraffes.

Mkomazi National Park

The snows of Kilimanjaro hover above the hills of this newly designated park, where you’ll find herds of grazing giraffes, elephants, zebras, elands, buffalo, and horned oryx and kudu, as well as extremely endangered black rhinos and African wild dogs. And if you’re a bird-watcher, bring your life list, because 450 species have been spotted here.

Serengeti National Park

The Serengeti has come to symbolize all the grandeur of Africa, and its annual migration of a million wildebeests is one of the greatest spectacles the planet has to offer. In fact, Tanzania’s oldest and most popular park has recently been declared by some to be the seventh wonder of the world.

Tarangire National Park

This park’s namesake river is a dry-season lifeline to hundreds of elephants and thousands upon thousands of zebras, impalas, gazelles, hartebeests, eland, and buffalo. Only the Serengeti tops it in Its panoply of life, including birds worthy of superlatives—the world’s largest ostrich species, the world’s heaviest flying bird (the kori bustard)—some 550 species in all.