The Gisakura tea plantations are one of Rwanda's most beautiful postcards: a sea of electric-green tea bushes climbing and rolling over the hills of the south-west, right on the edge of the ancient Nyungwe forest. The contrast between the bright, geometric green of the cultivated tea and the dark, wild green of the rainforest is an image that sums up rural Rwanda at its finest.
Gisakura is not just scenery: it is a working tea estate, where you can walk among the bushes, watch the pickers gathering the tender shoots, visit the factory and learn the whole process, from field to cup. And just a few steps away, a small patch of forest cut off from the park is home to a troop of black-and-white colobus monkeys that are easy to spot, a bonus that rounds the visit off nicely.
This guide takes a practical look at Gisakura: how to visit the plantation and the tea factory, how to see the colobus monkeys in the small forest, when to go, where to stay and how to combine the estate with activities in Nyungwe National Park, which it literally borders. A cultural and scenic stop you shouldn't miss, both to understand one of Rwanda's great exports and to enjoy its tea-covered hills.
Tea growing arrived in Rwanda during the Belgian colonial period, in the mid-20th century, and found ideal conditions in the country's rainy, volcanic highlands. Gisakura, on the edge of the Nyungwe forest, became one of the best-known tea estates in the south-west, and today it is part of the Rwanda Mountain Tea industry. Tea is one of Rwanda's main exports, and its plantations, an intense green across the hills, are part of the country's landscape and economy.
Read the full history ↓One of the oldest mountain forests in Africa: chimpanzees, dozens of primates, a suspended walkway through the treetops and a sea of tea plantations.
Read the history of The south-west and Nyungwe Forest →A local guide tells you in half an hour what no sign at the site will ever explain. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 7 activities in Kigali. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Tea is not native to Rwanda: the plant (Camellia sinensis) comes from Asia, and commercial growing reached the country in the colonial era, brought by the Belgian administration in the mid-20th century. Colonial specialists found that Rwanda's highlands, with their volcanic, acidic soils, plenty of rain and a cool, steady climate, offered almost ideal conditions for tea, comparable to those of the world's great tea-growing regions.
The first plantations were set up in the 1950s and 1960s, and the south-west of the country, around Nyungwe Forest, proved one of the best-suited areas thanks to its altitude and humidity. Gisakura, on the western edge of the forest, gradually became one of Rwanda's best-known tea estates, its slopes covered in green bushes that reach right up to the edge of the rainforest.
Tea thus joined coffee, which had arrived earlier, as an export crop, transforming the landscape of many Rwandan hills and creating an industry that employs thousands of families. After independence, that colonial legacy became a pillar of the national economy.
Gisakura's location, right on the edge of Nyungwe National Park, tells a story of contact and tension between farming and nature. The tea plantations took over land cleared from the forest or from its fringes, and today they draw a sharp line between the geometric green of the crop and the dark, wild green of the ancient rainforest, one of the oldest montane forests in Africa.
That frontier left some curiosities, such as the well-known Gisakura forest patch: a small fragment of rainforest cut off from the main Nyungwe massif and surrounded by plantations, which is still home to a troop of black-and-white colobus monkeys. It is a tiny-scale reminder of what the whole landscape looked like before farming spread.
Over time, Rwanda came to see that Nyungwe Forest was worth more protected than cut down, for its biodiversity, its role as a water source and its appeal to visitors, and in 2004 it was declared a national park. The tea plantations on its edge, such as Gisakura, came to coexist with conservation and even became part of what the area offers visitors.
Today tea is, alongside coffee, one of Rwanda's main exports and a key source of foreign currency and jobs, especially in the south-west and north-west of the country. Production is organised into large estates and smallholder cooperatives, with factories that process the green leaf into the black tea sold at international auctions, above all the one in Mombasa.
Gisakura is part of this modern industry and is now linked to groups such as Rwanda Mountain Tea, which run several estates and factories in the country. Rwanda's high-altitude tea has a good reputation for quality, thanks to the steady climate and to hand-picking the best leaves, shoot by shoot.
Behind every cup lies a huge amount of human work: thousands of pickers who gather the tender shoots by hand over long days, and whole communities whose lives revolve around the plant. Visiting Gisakura gives you a glimpse of that real economy, and buying tea at the source directly supports local families.
In recent decades, the Gisakura tea plantations have become more than just a place of production. With the boom in nature tourism in Rwanda, they are now an attraction in their own right. Their photogenic beauty, with rolling hills of green tea set against the dark backdrop of Nyungwe Forest, and their closeness to the park's western gate made them a must-stop on the south-western circuit.
New places to stay opened, from the simple Gisakura Guesthouse to the luxury One&Only Nyungwe House, set within a tea plantation. Together with guided visits to see how tea is made and to the colobus forest patch, they made the estate part of the Nyungwe experience. In a single day, travellers can go from chimpanzee trekking to walking among tea bushes and tasting a cup of freshly processed tea.
In this way, Gisakura sums up an important part of today's Rwanda: a country that has turned its colonial farming legacy into a national industry, protects its natural heritage and is firmly committed to high-quality tourism that shares the benefits with rural communities.
