Liwonde National Park is the jewel of Malawi's safaris and the best place in the country to see big animals. It stretches along the Shire River in the south, and its great appeal is that it combines two very different safaris: the classic 4x4 drive through mopane woodland and savannah, and the unforgettable boat safari on the river, gliding past hippos, giant crocodiles and elephants coming down to drink, with hundreds of water birds all around.
Its recent history is some of the best news in African conservation. In the early 2010s, Liwonde was a park battered by poaching, full of wire snares and with serious conflicts between wildlife and neighbouring communities. In 2015, the NGO African Parks took over its management: it removed tens of thousands of snares, stopped the poaching and reintroduced species that had disappeared. Today Liwonde has cheetahs, lions and black rhinos again, and it is a Big Five park.
This guide covers Liwonde from a practical angle: what the boat and vehicle safaris are like, what wildlife you'll see, when to go, how to get there from Blantyre or the lake, where to stay (from the African Parks camp at Mvuu to luxury lodges) and how to combine it with Majete, Zomba or Lake Malawi. A couple of nights in Liwonde are enough to understand why it has become the heart of Malawi's nature tourism.
Liwonde was declared a national park in 1973 to protect its stretch of the Shire River and its wildlife, but for decades it suffered from poaching and from conflicts with neighbouring communities, which left it littered with snares and with many species decimated. Everything changed in 2015, when the NGO African Parks took over its management under an agreement with the Malawian government: it removed tens of thousands of wire snares, stepped up protection and brought back lost species — cheetahs, lions and black rhinos. In just a few years Liwonde went from a plundered park to a model of recovery and the best safari destination in the country. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The economic and historical heart of Malawi: the mission city of Blantyre, the old capital of Zomba, the reborn parks of the Shire River and the granite massif of Mulanje.
Read the history of The deep south: the Shire and the mountains →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
You can't understand Liwonde's natural history without the Shire River, the great waterway that runs through the park from north to south. The Shire is the only outlet of Lake Malawi: it rises at the southern tip of the lake, flows some 520 kilometres south and finally empties into the Zambezi River in Mozambique. As it passes through Liwonde, the river widens into lagoons, sandbanks and marshes that support one of the largest concentrations of aquatic wildlife in the region.
That ribbon of water, in the middle of a land that turns hard and dusty in the dry season, makes Liwonde a magnet for animals. Hundreds of hippos live in the river, huge Nile crocodiles lurk along its banks and, in the dry season, herds of elephants, buffalo, antelope and zebra converge on the water from the surrounding mopane woodland. More than 400 bird species, from the African fish eagle to the much sought-after Pel's fishing owl, depend on the Shire and its borassus palm groves.
Liwonde's landscape combines that lush riverfront with stretches of dry mopane woodland, palm groves, floodplain grasslands and a few hills. This variety of habitats, all tied together by the river, is the ecological foundation that made the area valuable for conservation long before it became the country's star safari destination.
Liwonde National Park was established in 1973, shortly after Malawi's independence (1964), to protect this stretch of the Shire River and its extraordinary wildlife. The area's natural wealth had already been recognised in the colonial days of Nyasaland, but it was the young Malawian state that gave it national park status, as part of an effort to preserve the country's nature and lay the groundwork for future tourism.
In its early decades, Liwonde held healthy populations of elephants, hippos, antelope and birds, and it earned a reputation among the few travellers who made it to Malawi for its river scenery and boat safaris. However, the park never had enough resources for effective protection. Human pressure around it was enormous: densely populated communities surrounded its boundaries, and poverty drove many people to poach and to enter the park in search of firewood, fish and land.
The result was a slow decline. Through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, poaching wiped out entire species: rhinos disappeared, lions stopped breeding, cheetahs became locally extinct and even the elephants suffered. The park was littered with wire snares, and conflict between wildlife (above all elephants raiding crops) and neighbouring villages became serious and sometimes deadly. Liwonde embodied the plight of many African parks: a natural treasure with no means to defend itself.
The turning point came in 2015, when the South African NGO African Parks signed an agreement with Malawi's Department of National Parks and Wildlife to take over the full management of Liwonde (as well as the nearby Majete reserve and, later, Nkhotakota). African Parks specialises in rehabilitating parks on the brink of collapse through a long-term management model, with its own funding, professional rangers and work with local communities.
When African Parks took over Liwonde, the park was in a critical state: tens of thousands of wire snares are estimated to have been scattered across it, and the rate of human-wildlife conflict was among the highest in the region. The organisation launched one of the largest snare-removal operations in the history of African conservation, dismantling tens of thousands of snares and stopping the bleeding of wildlife. It strengthened protection with well-trained rangers and technology, and all but eradicated the poaching of large mammals.
A key measure was building an electric perimeter fence around the park. Far from cutting nature off, the fence drastically reduced conflict: elephants stopped destroying the crops of neighbouring villages and people stopped dying in those encounters, which transformed the communities' relationship with the park. With security restored, Liwonde was ready for the next step: bringing back the species it had lost.
With the park secure, African Parks began a series of reintroductions that restored Liwonde's status as a major wildlife reserve. In 2017, cheetahs returned to the park after some twenty years' absence, in a translocation that marked their return to Malawi. The following year, in 2018, a founding population of lions was reintroduced (brought from South Africa and from Majete itself), decades after the park had lost its breeding population.
The biggest milestone came in 2019, when 17 black rhinos were moved from South Africa to Liwonde in one of the largest international black rhino translocations ever carried out. The operation, enormously complex in logistical terms, boosted the battered population of this critically endangered species and gave Liwonde back one of the Big Five. With lions, leopards, elephants, buffalo and rhinos, the park became a Big Five destination, something exceptional in Malawi.
Liwonde also became a wildlife 'factory' for the rest of the country: its now-thriving populations were used to restock other Malawian parks. In 2016 and 2017, hundreds of elephants from Liwonde and Majete were moved to the Nkhotakota reserve in one of the largest elephant translocations in history, easing overpopulation in Liwonde and bringing elephants back to an almost empty park. Liwonde's recovery thus became the engine of a nationwide conservation network.
In just a few years, Liwonde went from a plundered park to a recovery case study and the flagship of nature tourism in Malawi. Wildlife is thriving: the park has one of the highest elephant densities in the region, large pods of hippos, sable antelope and kudu, and the reintroduced populations of lions, cheetahs and rhinos are taking hold. Fish stocks in the river have recovered and, with the return of predators, even vultures are back in the park's skies.
This revival rests on work with neighbouring communities, without which no conservation lasts. African Parks runs environmental education programmes in local schools, creates local jobs, supports beekeeping and community tourism projects and shares part of the park's revenue with the villages. The underlying idea is that the people who live alongside Liwonde should see the park as a source of opportunity, not as a rival for land and resources.
Today Liwonde welcomes travellers from all over the world who come for its boat safaris on the Shire, its dawn 4x4 drives and its guided walks, staying anywhere from African Parks' simple camp at Mvuu to luxury riverside lodges. Liwonde's story, from wire snare to reintroduced rhino, has become one of the great stories of hope in African conservation and the best showcase for Malawi's nature.
