Campo Ma'an National Park is one of the great natural treasures of southern Cameroon: a vast block of coastal equatorial rainforest, close to the Atlantic and the border with Equatorial Guinea, protecting some of the richest biodiversity in the country. Its more than 2,600 km² are home to western lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, mandrills, forest elephants, leopards and an astonishing range of fauna and flora: dozens of mammal species, hundreds of birds, reptiles, fish and thousands of plants.
Its big advantage over the famous Dja Reserve is its relative accessibility and, above all, its closeness to the coast: Campo Ma'an lets you combine a deep dive into the jungle — walks in search of primates, elephants and birds — with the beaches and the Lobé Falls of Kribi, bringing forest and sea together in a single trip. It is a destination for nature and adventure, not a comfortable safari: here you walk, you track and you learn to read the forest, with sightings that take patience and luck.
This guide explains how Campo Ma'an is really visited — access, fees, mandatory guides and eco-guards, seasons, what to expect to see — what wildlife it holds and how to link it with Kribi for a coast-and-forest circuit. It is an experience for lovers of wild nature who are willing to put up with bad tracks and basic camps in exchange for venturing into one of the best-preserved rainforests on the coast of Central Africa.
The Campo Ma'an forest is part of the great coastal forest massif of southern Cameroon, the ancestral land of forest peoples — including Pygmy groups — and Bantu peoples. It was declared a National Park in 2000, as part of the environmental measures tied to the Chad-Cameroon pipeline, as compensation for the impact of that major project. Together with its buffer zone, it forms an operational technical unit for conservation, designed to protect biodiversity and reconcile it with development. Its natural and conservation history is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The estuary of the “River of Prawns”: the land of the Duala, vibrant economic Douala, the beaches of Kribi where a river falls into the sea, and the coastal rainforest of Campo Ma'an.
Read the history of Littoral and south coast →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Campo Ma'an National Park protects part of the great block of equatorial rainforest that covers southern Cameroon and stretches into Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the rest of the Congo Basin, the second-largest tropical forest in the world after the Amazon. It is a warm, humid lowland rainforest that grows close to the Atlantic coast, between the ocean and the interior, in a corner where the forest reaches almost all the way to the sea.
These forests formed over millions of years in the equatorial belt, where plentiful rain and stable temperatures allowed lush vegetation and extraordinary biodiversity to flourish. The Campo Ma'an area is home to thousands of plant species and a very complete range of rainforest wildlife: lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, mandrills, drills, forest elephants, leopards and a remarkably rich birdlife.
This southern region, between Kribi, Campo and the Ntem River border, was for thousands of years the territory of forest peoples, including Pygmy groups, and of Bantu communities who lived from hunting, fishing, gathering and shifting agriculture. The forest was their home and their source of life long before colonial borders were drawn or the limits of a national park were marked on the map.
The Campo Ma'an area and its surroundings have been inhabited by various peoples since ancient times. Groups of hunter-gatherers live in the forest of the interior, among them Pygmy communities with a deep knowledge of the forest, its animals and its plants. Bantu farming and fishing peoples settled along the edges and towards the coast, combining cultivation, hunting and the use of resources from the sea and the rivers.
The Campo area, at the mouth of the Ntem River (which marks the border with Equatorial Guinea), was a meeting point between the world of the forest and the world of the sea, and between different peoples and, later, colonies. This coast was part of the Gulf of Guinea sailed by European navigators from the 15th century onwards. Like the rest of the region, it came under the German protectorate of Kamerun from 1884, and then under French administration after the First World War.
That human background is still alive today. The communities around the park, in places such as Campo, Ma'an and others, keep their bond with the forest and its resources. This raises a challenge shared by so many protected areas in Africa: reconciling nature conservation with the rights and needs of the people who have lived in and from the forest for generations.
Campo Ma'an National Park was created in 2000, and its creation is closely tied to one of the largest infrastructure projects in Cameroon's history: the Chad-Cameroon pipeline. This huge project, partly financed by the World Bank, was built to carry oil from southern Chad, a landlocked country, across Cameroon to the Atlantic coast near Kribi, where it is exported by ship.
A project on that scale, cutting through rainforests and fragile ecosystems, caused serious environmental and social concern. As part of the required mitigation and compensation measures, protected areas were set up to conserve the biodiversity affected or threatened by the work. Campo Ma'an National Park was created within that framework. It protects a large block of southern coastal rainforest together with its buffer zone, in a management unit designed to balance conservation and development.
So Campo Ma'an is partly the child of a major oil project: a national park that came about as an environmental counterweight to an industrial venture. That double nature (conservation and development, oil and rainforest) sums up the tensions of southern Cameroon well, where natural wealth sits alongside resource extraction, the port of Kribi and large-scale infrastructure.
Campo Ma'an protects some of the richest biodiversity in southern Cameroon: dozens of mammal species (including lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, mandrills, drills and forest elephants), hundreds of birds, many reptiles and fish, and thousands of plants. It is a key stronghold for the threatened wildlife of Central Africa's coastal rainforest. It is managed by the Ministry of Forests and Wildlife (MINFOF), with support from conservation agencies and NGOs.
Like almost every rainforest in the region, the park faces threats. These include poaching (of elephants for their ivory and of wildlife for the bushmeat trade), logging and agricultural expansion, among them large plantations on its edges. There is also pressure from infrastructure and from development linked to the port of Kribi and the pipeline. Striking a balance between protecting the forest and meeting the needs of local people is an ongoing challenge.
Ecotourism is seen as a way to give the living forest economic value and so strengthen its protection. Wildlife, birds and rainforest, combined with the nearby Kribi coast, give Campo Ma'an great potential for nature tourism. That potential is still largely untapped because the park is hard to reach. Guided walks, primate tracking and birdwatching are the experiences it offers travellers willing to venture into this forest on the southern coast.
What makes Campo Ma'an truly unusual is its location. It is one of the few large rainforests in Cameroon that reaches almost to the sea, so you can combine jungle and coast on the same trip. The town of Campo, one of the gateways to the park, sits on the Atlantic at the mouth of the Ntem River, which marks the border with Equatorial Guinea. Here rainforest, river, sea and border all meet.
Covering more than 2.600 km², the park is home to exceptional biodiversity. It has dozens of mammal species, including the western lowland gorilla and the chimpanzee (both threatened), along with forest elephants, mandrills and the drill, one of Africa's rarest primates. It also has hundreds of birds and thousands of plants. It is one of the most complete collections of wildlife and plant life on the Central African coast.
Its origin is unusual too: the park was created in 2000 as an environmental compensation measure for the great Chad-Cameroon pipeline, in other words as a green counterweight to an oil project. Compared with the better-known and more remote Dja Reserve, Campo Ma'an is easier to reach. Above all, it offers a rare chance to combine tracking gorillas and elephants in the rainforest with Kribi's golden beaches and the Lobé Falls. Rainforest and sea, nature and adventure, all in one corner of southern Cameroon.
