Tanzania





Serengeti National Park

The Serengeti is Africa’s most famous game reserve, and probably its finest. Gazetted in 1951, this legendary park forms the 14,763 sq km centrepiece of a cross-border ecosystem that stages the world’s greatest annual animal migration, consisting of some two million bleating wildebeest, together with a supporting cast of zebra, gazelle, eland, hartebeest, and predatorial hangers-on such as hyena, vulture, lion and jackal. And even when the migration is quiet, the Serengeti offers arguably the most scintillating game-viewing in Africa: great herds of buffalo, smaller groups of elephant and giraffe, and thousands upon thousands of eland, topi, kongoni, impala and Grant’s gazelle.

For many, it is the Serengeti’s soul stirring sense of space that endures in the memory: the horizonless oceans of grassland alluded to in the Maasai name Serengit (‘endless plain’), cropped and yellow in the dry season, tall and green after the rains. And while the very popularity of the Serengeti means that the central plains around the Seronera headquarters can occasionally be a little overpopulated with 4x4s, the northern and western two-thirds of the vast park remain surprisingly untrammelled – indeed, there are still parts of the Serengeti where a game drive might yield more lion sightings than other tourists!






Vegetation and habitats

Wildlife

Activities

Getting there

Where to stay

Nearby places of interest





Vegetation and habitats






Wildlife







Activities
 





Getting there





Where to stay
 





Nearby places of interest



Checklist of conspicuous and noteworthy mammals: lion, leopard, cheetah, serval, spotted hyena, striped hyena, golden jackal, black-backed jackal, side-striped jackal, bat-eared fox, banded mongoose, white-tailed mongoose, common genet, blue wildebeest, Coke’s hartebeest, topi, Defassa waterbuck, common reedbuck, impala, Thomson’s gazelle, Grant’s gazelle, eland, bushbuck, common duiker, Kirk’s dik-dik, steenbok, klipspringer, African elephant, African buffalo, black rhinoceros, common zebra, hippo, warthog, Maasai giraffe, olive baboon, vervet monkey, blue monkey, patas monkey, black-and-white colobus, rock hyrax.