Important notice: this guide covers Garamba National Park, in the remote and sensitive northeast of the DR Congo, along the border with South Sudan. The area has suffered from the activity of armed groups and poachers, and security is fragile and variable. Any visit must be made only with a specialist operator, in coordination with African Parks/ICCN and after checking official travel advice. This is not a destination to venture into on your own.
That said, Garamba is one of Africa's great wildlife sanctuaries and one of the continent's oldest national parks, a World Heritage Site since 1980. Its grassy savannahs in northeastern Congo (an open, bright landscape, very different from the rainforest in the rest of the country) are home to elephants, buffalo, hippos, the rare Kordofan giraffe and wildlife that the NGO African Parks is fighting to protect and restore, including an ambitious project to reintroduce the white rhino.
This guide presents Garamba with a practical, responsible eye: what wildlife it holds, its heroic conservation story against poaching, how a visit is organised (with enormous difficulty), and the essential safety warnings. It is an extreme expedition destination for very well-prepared, well-advised travellers, combining one of the best potential safaris in the Congo with a complex frontier reality.
Garamba National Park was created in 1938, making it one of the oldest parks in Africa, to protect the savannahs of northeastern Congo and their wildlife, especially the northern white rhino, for which it was the last great wild refuge. Declared a World Heritage Site in 1980, it endured decades of devastating poaching (which wiped out the northern white rhino in the wild) and the violence of armed groups such as the LRA. Since 2005, management by African Parks together with the ICCN has been working to restore it, with notable success. Its full story is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Where the great forest opens out into savannah, near the border with South Sudan, Garamba National Park is home to elephants, giraffes and buffalo. It is an expedition destination in a remote and sensitive area.
Read the history of The northeastern savannahs →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Garamba National Park protects an exceptional landscape within the DR Congo: the grassy savannahs of the country's far north-east, in Haut-Uélé province, along the border with South Sudan. Unlike the immense equatorial rainforest that covers most of the Congo, Garamba is a world of open grasslands, gallery forests along the Garamba, Dungu and Aka rivers, and the large-mammal wildlife typical of Africa's savannahs, closer to that of the east of the continent than to the forested heart of the Congo.
This zone of ecological transition, between the Congo rainforest and the savannahs of the Sahel and East Africa, makes Garamba a biologically unique place. Savannah species live alongside forest elements here, and its border location links it to the ecosystems of South Sudan and Uganda. The large herbivores —elephants, buffalo, giraffes, antelopes— found an ideal habitat in these grasslands.
Before it became a park, the region was home to peoples of the Congolese north-east who lived by farming, herding and hunting. Its distance from the centres of power and its position on the border would shape much of its later history: a remote land, rich in wildlife, but hard to control and protect, exposed to the turmoil of one of the most unstable regions in Africa.
Garamba National Park was created in 1938, under the Belgian colonial administration, making it one of the oldest national parks in Africa and in the world. It was set up to protect the savannahs of the north-eastern Congo and their extraordinary wildlife, with one flagship goal: safeguarding the northern white rhino, for which Garamba was one of the last great wild refuges. The park was thus born with a pioneering conservation mission.
In its early decades, Garamba was also famous for an unusual experiment: the 'elephant domestication station' at Gangala-na-Bodio, where African elephants were captured and trained, something quite rare (unlike the Asian elephant, the African elephant is seldom domesticated). Those trained elephants became a symbol of the park and a well-known curiosity of the colonial era, although the practice faded over time.
In 1980, UNESCO inscribed Garamba on the World Heritage List, recognising its outstanding universal value as a habitat for endangered species —led by the northern white rhino— and as one of the great savannah ecosystems of Central Africa. That international recognition confirmed the park's importance, just before one of the most dramatic chapters in its history began.
Garamba's history is branded by the tragedy of the northern white rhino. This subspecies, which once lived in several parts of Central Africa, was gradually pushed back to almost a single wild stronghold: the savannahs of Garamba. In the mid-20th century, and again at various times, its population in the park rose and fell with the intensity of poaching, driven by demand for rhino horn in Asian and Middle Eastern markets.
Despite conservation efforts and international alarm, poaching —often carried out by heavily armed gangs, amid wars and regional instability— was relentless. In the early 21st century, the last wild northern white rhinos, those of Garamba, disappeared: the subspecies became functionally extinct in the wild. Today only a couple of females survive, in captivity and under permanent guard in Kenya, and scientists are trying assisted reproduction techniques to prevent their total disappearance.
The loss of the northern white rhino in Garamba became a global symbol of the tragedy of extinction and of the failure to stop poaching. It was a huge blow to conservation in Africa, and it put the park at the centre of international attention. Garamba came to stand for both the natural wealth of the Congo and the extreme fragility of its wildlife in the face of greed and violence.
Garamba suffered not only from poaching but also from the violence of one of the most turbulent regions in Africa. Its location in the north-east of the Congo, on the borders with South Sudan and not far from Uganda and the Central African Republic, exposed it to spillover from neighbouring conflicts. The park and its surroundings even became an area of operations for the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), the feared armed group of Ugandan origin led by Joseph Kony, notorious for its atrocities, child abductions and massacres.
Besides the LRA, the park faced the threat of heavily armed poachers, often linked to military or rebel groups in the region and to ivory trafficking networks, who attacked the elephants and the rangers themselves. Garamba became one of the most dangerous frontlines of conservation anywhere in the world: many rangers died defending the park and its wildlife in armed clashes with poachers and militias.
This combination of industrial-scale poaching, armed groups and border instability brought Garamba to the brink of collapse. Its elephant and giraffe populations plummeted, and the rhino vanished. The park, one of the oldest and most valuable in Africa, seemed doomed. But just then an exceptional effort to save it began.
In 2005, the NGO African Parks took over the management of Garamba in partnership with the Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation (ICCN), in one of the toughest bets in African conservation. The organisation invested resources to professionalise and equip the rangers, bring in aerial surveillance and anti-poaching technology, and protect the elephants and the little wildlife that remained, in a constant and dangerous struggle with armed gangs. In 2025, African Parks and the ICCN renewed their partnership, marking twenty years of working together in the park.
The results, achieved at a high human cost, have been remarkable. Elephant killings have fallen dramatically and their populations are stabilising; the Kordofan giraffe, on the verge of disappearing from the park, has been protected and monitored; and a degree of security has returned that seemed impossible decades ago. The most symbolic milestone has been the return of the rhino: after the extinction of the northern white rhino, African Parks moved southern white rhinos to Garamba, with a first group in 2023 and more animals in 2025 and 2026, bringing rhinos back to these savannahs after years of absence.
Today Garamba is a symbol that recovery is possible, even in the most adverse conditions. It is still a park in a fragile region, with security challenges and enormous difficulties, but also one of the DR Congo's best potential safari destinations and a story of heroic conservation. For well-prepared and well-advised travellers, visiting it —always with African Parks and with every precaution— means supporting one of the bravest efforts to save Africa's wildlife. From the rhino's last refuge to the testing ground for its return, Garamba embodies both the drama and the hope of Congolese nature.
