Gonarezhou National Park: the place of elephants

A hard-won wilderness

Gonarezhou means the place of elephants in Shona; a secondary reading, elephant's tusk, comes from folklore about herbalists storing medicines in tusks. The area was set aside as a game reserve in the mid-1930s, then spent decades effectively closed as the Rhodesian Bush War and the Mozambican civil war rolled over this border country. It was proclaimed a national park in 1975 and only reopened to tourism in 1994.

That closed history is why the park feels the way it does today: 5,053 square kilometres, Zimbabwe's second largest park, with a roughly 100-kilometre border with Mozambique and a level of wildness that its more famous neighbours lost long ago.

Cliffs, rivers and the lowest point in Zimbabwe

The park's icon is the Chilojo Cliffs, a wall of red-orange sandstone roughly 180 metres high running some 20 kilometres along the south bank of the Runde River. Three rivers define the park: the Runde across the north, the Save on the eastern boundary, and the Mwenezi through the south. Where the Save meets the Runde, at about 162 metres above sea level, is the lowest point in Zimbabwe.

Beyond the cliffs the landmarks read like an explorer's notebook: the Tembwahata and Machanu pans, the Nyamatongwe Plateau, the red hills of Ntambambomvu, Samalema Gorge and Chivilila Falls.

The Trust: how the park is actually run

Since 1 March 2017 the park has been managed by the Gonarezhou Conservation Trust, a 20-year partnership between the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority and the Frankfurt Zoological Society that grew out of a 2010 memorandum. It is a genuinely unusual arrangement: the Trust employs the workforce, runs the camps and collects the accommodation revenue, while ZimParks continues to gazette the conservation fees.

The results are concrete. The Trust employs 180 rangers, hires the large majority of its staff from communities within 15 kilometres of the park, has set a fundraising target of more than US$40 million for development and operations, and runs a ground pangolin rehabilitation and release programme. One thing we will not repeat from other websites: claims that the park is already financially self-sustaining. That is a stated objective, not an achieved status.

Part of the Great Limpopo

Gonarezhou is one corner of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, joined to South Africa's Kruger and Mozambique's Limpopo National Park via the Sengwe-Tshipise corridor. The original treaty was signed in 2000, renamed in 2001 and formalised as an international treaty in 2002. The fences are confirmed down, and elephants, wild dogs and lions have been documented moving between Kruger and Gonarezhou.

As for the transfrontier park's total size, published figures genuinely conflict, ranging from around 30,000 square kilometres for the core to about 100,000 for the wider conservation area, so we decline to print a single settled number.

The park in numbers

Sources

• Gonarezhou Conservation Trust
• Frankfurt Zoological Society: Gonarezhou
• ZimParks: Gonarezhou National Park