Tsavo is safari in its purest form: huge, red and wild. It is the largest national park in Kenya and one of the largest in Africa, an ocean of savannah and scrub crossed by rivers, volcanic hills and lava fields. Here the elephants roll in the red earth and end up stained an unmistakable red. The Nairobi–Mombasa road and railway split it into two halves, Tsavo East and Tsavo West. It offers a far wilder, emptier and more adventurous experience than the country's busier reserves.
Tsavo East is home to large herds of red elephants and to lions, including the area's legendary males, which sometimes have no mane. It also holds the Yatta Plateau, one of the longest lava flows in the world. Tsavo West is more mountainous and greener. Its highlights include the crystal-clear Mzima Springs, where an underwater observatory lets you watch hippos and fish, as well as the Chyulu Hills and the Ngulia rhino sanctuary. Together, the two parks form one of the most important ecosystems on the continent.
This guide takes a practical look at Tsavo. It covers how to get there from Nairobi, Mombasa or the coast (including the SGR train that cuts through the middle), what to see in each of the two parks, how much the latest KWS fees cost, where to stay and how to plan your safari. If you're looking for the big, red, crowd-free Africa of the movies, Tsavo is exactly that.
The name Tsavo comes from a river and from a local word linked to slaughter. The area's history was marked by the famous 'man-eaters of Tsavo', two maneless lions that in 1898 killed dozens of workers building the Uganda Railway where it crossed the Tsavo River. The episode inspired books and films. Long before that, these lands were a route for ivory and slave caravans between the interior and the Swahili coast, and the territory of the Taita, Kamba and Orma peoples. Tsavo National Park was created in 1948, making it one of the first in Kenya. Since then it has seen dramatic waves of ivory poaching that decimated its elephants in the 1970s and 80s, followed by a slow recovery. Today it is a stronghold of the Kenya Wildlife Service in the fight against poaching. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓From the Masai Mara to Tsavo and arid Samburu: Kenya's great reserves stand on Maasai land and are home to the Great Migration and Africa's most famous wildlife.
Read the history of The great parks (south and north) →They depart from Moshi, 132 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before Tsavo became a national park, this vast stretch of red savannah and thorny scrub was a frontier land crossed by ancient routes. The name 'Tsavo' comes from the river of the same name and, according to the most widespread interpretations, is linked in local languages to the idea of slaughter or a place to be feared, a burden that later history would only confirm.
The region was home to peoples such as the Taita, in the hills of the same name, the Kamba (Akamba) to the north and west, and the Orma and Waata further east. The Waata were hunter-gatherers skilled with the bow and in gathering honey; the Kamba were adept long-distance traders. Across these plains passed the great caravans that carried ivory, and slaves too, from the interior of the continent to Swahili ports on the coast such as Mombasa. Water set the routes: travellers relied on rivers like the Tsavo and the Athi-Galana, and on springs like those at Mzima, to survive the crossing of a dry, hot and unforgiving land.
It was a landscape rich in wildlife, with huge herds of elephants, rhinos, lions and buffalo, but also full of dangers: thirst, malaria and the tsetse fly made Tsavo one of the hardest stretches of the road between the interior and the Indian Ocean. That reputation as a hostile place came centuries before it became a wildlife sanctuary.
At the end of the 19th century, the British Empire took on one of the most ambitious and controversial engineering projects in Africa: the Uganda Railway, which would link the port of Mombasa with Lake Victoria. The line, mockingly nicknamed 'the Lunatic Express' because of its cost and difficulties, had no choice but to cross the dry and dangerous Tsavo region.
In March 1898, while workers (many of them Indian labourers brought in by the British) were building a bridge over the Tsavo River, two male lions began attacking them at night, dragging them from their tents and eating them. For months, those two maneless big cats spread terror through the camp and brought the work to a halt. The engineer in charge, Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson, became obsessed with hunting them down and finally shot them in late 1898, after many failed attempts.
The exact number of victims has been debated for more than a century. The traditional figures, greatly exaggerated by Patterson, spoke of 135 dead, while later scientific studies, based on isotopic analysis of the lions' remains, estimated that just over two dozen people were eaten. Whatever the numbers, the episode of the 'Tsavo man-eaters' stuck in people's memory: the two lions were eventually sold to the Field Museum in Chicago, where they are displayed stuffed, and they inspired books and films such as 'The Ghost and the Darkness' (1996). The legend fixed Tsavo for good as the land of Africa's most fearsome lions.
During the first half of the 20th century, East Africa's wildlife came under growing pressure from sport hunting, subsistence hunting and colonial expansion. To protect the region's extraordinary wildlife, the British colonial administration created Tsavo National Park in 1948, one of Kenya's first, across a vast area of more than 20.000 km² of land considered unsuitable for farming and settlement because it was so dry.
For administrative reasons, the park was split from the start into two sectors separated by the railway line and the Nairobi–Mombasa road: Tsavo East and Tsavo West, each managed separately. That division, born of logistics, still stands today. Creating the park also meant displacing and excluding peoples such as the Waata, who had hunted and gathered on these lands for generations, a troubling side shared by many protected areas in Africa during the colonial era.
In its first decades, Tsavo established itself as one of the continent's great sanctuaries for elephants and rhinos, with populations that reached the tens of thousands. But that same wealth would, a few years later, make it the epicentre of one of the worst conservation tragedies in African history.
Between the 1970s and the 1980s, Tsavo went through one of the darkest chapters of conservation in Africa. Soaring ivory prices on international markets set off an unprecedented wave of poaching. Armed gangs, often better equipped than the rangers, moved into Tsavo to kill elephants on a massive scale and smuggle out the tusks.
The consequences were catastrophic. Tsavo's elephant population, estimated at more than 35,000 animals in the 1960s, plunged to just a few thousand by the end of the 1980s. Black rhinos, which had once numbered in the thousands, were all but wiped out, reduced to a few dozen survivors. On top of the poaching came a severe drought in the early 1970s that also killed many elephants through starvation, partly because of the overpopulation the park itself had reached. Tsavo's landscape was littered with skeletons and hacked-off tusks.
The African ivory crisis of those years led to the worldwide ban on the international ivory trade approved by CITES in 1989. In Kenya that same year, the newly appointed head of the wildlife service, palaeontologist Richard Leakey, organised the public burning of twelve tonnes of confiscated ivory in Nairobi, an image that went around the world and marked a turning point in the fight against poaching. Wounded but not defeated, Tsavo then began a slow recovery.
Since the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) was created in 1989 and the fight against poaching was stepped up, Tsavo has made a remarkable recovery. With better-equipped patrols, international cooperation and the fenced Ngulia rhino sanctuary in Tsavo West, the elephant population grew again until it once more numbered in the tens of thousands, and black rhinos began breeding in protected areas. Today Tsavo is one of KWS's strongholds for the conservation of large mammals in Kenya.
The park still faces modern challenges: pressure from the human population along its borders, conflict between elephants and farmers, droughts made ever more severe by climate change, and the major infrastructure that crosses it, such as the Nairobi–Mombasa road and the modern standard gauge railway (SGR) opened in 2017, which runs through the ecosystem with wildlife crossings designed to let animals move between the two sectors.
Today Tsavo East and Tsavo West together make up one of Kenya's most important and least crowded safari destinations. Their herds of red elephants, their legendary lions, the Mzima springs, the lava fields and the views of Kilimanjaro draw travellers looking for big, wild Africa, far from the crowds. From the feared route of the ivory caravans to the sanctuary that now fights to protect the elephants, Tsavo's story sums up, in a single red landscape, the troubled and hopeful relationship between people and Africa's wildlife.
