About the park
Hwange National Park: Zimbabwe's great elephant country
Zimbabwe's largest park, the size of Northern Ireland, built on a paradox: it has no permanent rivers, and yet it holds one of the biggest elephant populations in Africa. The reason is a network of pumped waterholes that keeps the whole ecosystem alive.
A park without a river
At 14,650 square kilometres Hwange is Zimbabwe's biggest national park, stretching from Kalahari sand in the south to basalt country in the north along the Botswana border. It was proclaimed a game reserve in 1928, when it was known as Wankie, and forms part of the vast KAZA conservation area linking five countries.
What makes Hwange unlike any other major park is what it lacks: there is no perennial river and almost no natural permanent water. Everything you see in the dry season exists because water is pumped to the surface.
The waterholes that built the park
Ted Davison, the park's first warden from 1928, began sinking boreholes to hold game in the reserve through the dry months. Nearly a century later around sixty waterholes are pumped across the park, increasingly by solar rather than diesel, delivering over a million litres a day.
It is not the government doing this alone. Trusts such as Bhejane and Friends of Hwange, along with private operators, fund and maintain much of the pumping, the firebreaks and the access roads. When you pay your park fee or stay at a camp here, this is what your money keeps running.
Three sectors, three characters
| Sector | Size | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Main Camp | 10,765 km² | The classic Hwange: pumped pans, viewing platforms, easiest access, roughly 80 percent of all visitors |
| Sinamatella | 1,328 km² | Northern basalt country on a ridge with long views, quieter, rougher roads |
| Robins | 2,679 km² | The far north-west, highest lion density in the park and buffalo herds over two thousand strong, about 5 percent of visitors |
Elephants, and a lion the world remembers
Hwange holds Zimbabwe's largest elephant population, commonly estimated at around forty thousand at the height of the dry season, though no recent official census has been published. Culling ended in 1986 and the population roughly doubled in the five years that followed.
The park is also where Cecil the lion lived for thirteen years before he was killed just outside its boundary in July 2015, an event that put trophy hunting on front pages worldwide. Hwange has been a long-term lion research site for Oxford University's WildCRU, so the lions here are among the best-studied in Africa.