Chobe National Park is synonymous with elephants. Nowhere else in the world do you see so many: the region is home to more than a hundred thousand, and in the dry season the herds gather on the Chobe River in breathtaking numbers, coming down to drink, bathe and swim across to the islands. But Chobe is much more than elephants: it is a vast and varied park, with lions that hunt buffalo, leopards, hippos, crocodiles, and one of the best water-based safari experiences in Africa.
The park has four faces. The Chobe Riverfront, next to Kasane, is the most famous and accessible, with its river cruises and huge concentrations of wildlife. The Savuti region, in the centre, is a land of legendary lions and a mysterious channel that flows and dries up for decades at a time. The Linyanti wetlands, to the west, hide some of the best wild dog sightings. And the dry interior of Nogatsaa completes a mosaic of landscapes that ranges from water to desert.
This guide explores Chobe with a practical eye: its regions, the river cruise and game drives, the wildlife you can see, park fees, how to get there and how to combine it with the Delta and Victoria Falls. Botswana's first national park and a jewel of African safari, Chobe offers something few places can match: the chance to see wildlife in almost prehistoric abundance, with the river, the savannah and the huge northern sky as the backdrop.
Chobe National Park was Botswana's first national park, proclaimed in 1967, just a year after independence, over a region of extraordinary wildlife that people had already sought to protect since colonial times. Its name comes from the Chobe River, and its fame grew alongside its countless elephants and the Savuti region, the setting of celebrated documentaries about lions. With the tourism boom at nearby Victoria Falls, Chobe became one of the most visited safari destinations in Africa. Its full story is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The kingdom of the elephants: where four countries meet beside the Chobe River, Botswana's first national park holds the largest concentration of elephants on the planet, just a step away from Victoria Falls.
Read the history of Chobe and the northeast →If you only have one day, take a guided tour on the first one: it sets up the rest of your trip and saves you a lot of walking. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 10 activities in Victoria Falls. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
They depart from Victoria Falls, 140 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The park's history begins with its river. The Chobe is an unusual waterway: it rises in the highlands of Angola (where it is called the Cuando or Kwando), flows south, spreads out into the Linyanti wetlands on Botswana's border with Namibia, and finally runs east as the Chobe River until it joins the Zambezi near Kasane. That system of rivers and wetlands, surrounded by land that grows drier to the south, acts as a magnet for wildlife in north-eastern Botswana.
For centuries, that abundance supported large wildlife populations and the peoples who lived by hunting, fishing and herding in the region. Elephants in particular found a paradise here: permanent water in the river and vast woodlands and savannahs to feed in. The Chobe region thus became one of the last great refuges of Africa's megafauna, with a density of animals that amazed travellers.
When European explorers and hunters arrived in the 19th century (among them David Livingstone, who travelled the nearby Zambezi), the fame of Chobe's wildlife grew, but so did hunting pressure. In the early 20th century, ivory and trophy hunting and outbreaks of rinderpest hit the region's wildlife hard, as in so many parts of Africa. The idea of protecting this natural treasure began to gain ground.
The idea of protecting Chobe's wildlife goes back to colonial times. As early as the first half of the 20th century, under the British Bechuanaland Protectorate, there were proposals to create a reserve in the region, driven by awareness of how exceptionally rich its wildlife was and how much danger it faced. In 1931 a game reserve was proposed for the area, but the plans fell through, partly because of tsetse fly outbreaks and other difficulties of the time.
In the following decades the pressure on wildlife continued, both from hunting and from forestry projects that logged the region's valuable woodlands. Even so, Chobe's extraordinary concentration of animals was still plain to see, and the push for conservation kept growing. The region wasn't just rich in elephants but in a huge variety of species, from lions and leopards to rare antelopes and spectacular birdlife.
Only in the early 1960s, as Bechuanaland moved towards independence, were the protection plans taken up again in earnest. A wildlife reserve was marked out in the Chobe area as a first step towards a fully fledged national park. The young nation about to be born quickly understood that its wildlife was a unique heritage and a valuable resource, and decided to protect it.
In 1966 Bechuanaland became independent and the Republic of Botswana was born. Just a year later, in 1967, the new country officially proclaimed Chobe National Park, its first national park. It was an early and meaningful statement: a newborn and still very poor nation chose, among its very first measures, to protect its natural heritage. The park took in the rich strip along the Chobe River and vast areas of the interior, eventually covering about 11,700 km² and becoming one of the largest in the country.
Creating the park also involved difficult and sometimes painful decisions, such as resettling communities that lived within its boundaries, among them groups of Basarwa (San) hunter-gatherers. It's a tension common to the history of many African parks, between nature conservation and the rights of local people, and it is part of Chobe's story.
Over time, Botswana developed a conservation and tourism policy that would become a model for the continent. Made wealthy after independence by the discovery of diamonds, the nation adopted a 'low volume, high value' tourism model: few visitors, high prices and heavy investment in protecting wildlife. Chobe, with its extraordinary abundance of animals, became one of the jewels of that system and one of the most renowned safari destinations in Africa.
If the riverfront made Chobe famous for its elephants, it was the Savuti region that cemented its place in the world's imagination through nature documentaries. Savuti, in the centre of the park, is a land of savannah and marsh dominated by the enigmatic Savuti Channel, a watercourse that flows and then dries up for decades at a time in an unpredictable way, a phenomenon that has puzzled scientists and is attributed to subtle tectonic movements in the region.
Those extreme swings turned Savuti into a dramatic stage of life and death, ideal for documentaries. Famous films were shot here about the lions of Savuti (some of which developed the astonishing ability to hunt young elephants in the dry season, when food is scarce) and about the age-old rivalry between lions and hyenas. National Geographic and BBC documentaries brought images of Savuti into millions of homes, and Chobe's fame along with them.
Savuti showed the world Chobe's wildest and most spectacular side: great herds of elephants gathering around scarce water, large and bold lion prides, cheetahs on the open plains, and the zebra migration that crosses the region in the rainy season. That epic character, added to the abundance of the riverfront, finally made Chobe a byword for African safari at its finest.
Today Chobe National Park is one of the most visited and celebrated safari destinations in Africa, and the jewel of northern Botswana. Its proximity to Kasane, with its international airport, and to Victoria Falls makes it very accessible, and its river cruises and game drives among elephant herds draw travellers from all over the world. Together with the Okavango Delta, Moremi, Savuti and Linyanti, it forms part of one of the planet's great nature circuits.
Botswana is home to Africa's largest elephant population (around 130,000 animals, many of them in the Chobe region), which is a huge conservation success but also a challenge. The abundance of elephants creates tensions: conflicts with communities and farming, pressure on vegetation, and an intense political debate over how to manage the population, including the controversial issue of hunting, which the country banned in 2014 and then partially reopened in 2019. Chobe sits at the centre of those debates.
The park also faces the challenges of climate change, the variability of water in its rivers (which rise in Angola), growing tourism pressure and the need to balance conservation, local communities and development. Even so, Chobe remains what it has been since 1967: a sanctuary where wildlife unfolds in an almost prehistoric abundance, a testament to Botswana's early commitment to its natural world, and one of the last great places where people can witness the full spectacle of African wildlife.
