Volcanoes National Park is Rwanda's jewel and one of the most extraordinary nature experiences on the planet. Among five volcanoes covered in forest and bamboo, in the Virunga range that the country shares with the Congo and Uganda, lives one of the last mountain gorilla populations in the world. Spending an hour a few metres from a wild family of these gentle giants —a huge silverback male keeping watch, the young playing, the females eating bamboo— is a privilege many describe as the most moving moment of their lives.
It was in these mountains that the American primatologist Dian Fossey studied and protected the gorillas for almost twenty years, until her murder in 1985, a story that the book and the film 'Gorillas in the Mist' brought to the whole world. Thanks to that pioneering work and the conservation that followed, mountain gorillas are today one of the few great apes whose population is growing. Seeing one up close also directly supports that conservation: a large share of the permit price goes to protecting the gorillas and the neighbouring communities.
This guide covers everything practical about the park: how gorilla trekking works, how much the permit costs and how to book it, what other activities there are (golden monkeys, Dian Fossey's grave, the volcano climbs), what to bring, how to get there from Kigali and where to stay. With the logistics sorted, a visit to Volcanoes National Park becomes the unforgettable heart of any trip to Rwanda.
Volcanoes National Park was created in 1925 as Africa's first national park, initially intended to protect mountain gorillas from hunters. Dian Fossey worked in these forests; in 1967 she founded the Karisoke Research Center and fought poaching until she was murdered in 1985. The 1994 genocide and regional instability hit the park hard, but since the early 2000s Rwanda has bet on high-value, low-density gorilla tourism, with expensive, limited permits that fund conservation. Today the mountain gorilla population is growing, and every year the Kwita Izina ceremony names the newborn babies. The full story is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓At the foot of the Virunga range, the mountain gorilla sanctuary that Dian Fossey made known to the world, among volcanoes, lava caves and terraced hills.
Read the history of The north and the volcanoes →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.
They depart from Kigali, 82 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Volcanoes National Park protects the Rwandan side of the Virunga Mountains, a chain of eight volcanoes —some still active— rising in the heart of Africa, where Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda meet. These mountains were born from the volcanic activity of Africa's Great Rift Valley, which over millions of years pushed up cones such as Karisimbi (4.507 m), Bisoke, Muhabura, Gahinga and Sabyinyo, and covered them in lush montane forest and bamboo forest.
This damp, cool and isolated setting is one of the last refuges of the mountain gorilla (Gorilla beringei beringei), a subspecies found in only two places in the world: the Virungas (shared by the three countries) and the Bwindi forest in Uganda. Mountain gorillas do not survive in captivity, which makes these forests absolutely vital to their existence. Alongside them live golden monkeys —also endemic to the region—, buffaloes, forest elephants, dozens of bird species and a unique Afro-alpine flora.
For the communities living at the foot of the volcanoes, these mountains have always held strong symbolic and spiritual value, as well as practical value: timber, water, land. That relationship, built on both dependence and respect, is part of the place's history, and it also explains the tensions that would later arise between wildlife conservation and the needs of the local population. The story of the park is, to a large extent, the story of how people tried to reconcile the two.
The protection of these volcanoes goes back to 1925, when the Belgian colonial authorities —who then ran Ruanda-Urundi and the Congo— created the Parc National Albert (now split between Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda and Virunga National Park in the Congo). It was the first national park on the entire African continent, and its original aim was precisely to protect mountain gorillas from the growing threat of hunters and collectors, at a time when these animals had only just been 'discovered' by Western science and were attracting huge interest.
Like so many parks of that era, it was created with a conservation vision that often ignored local people, restricting their access to land and resources they had used for generations. After Rwanda's independence in 1962, the park came under Rwandan administration and, over time, lost part of its area to farmland in a small, densely populated country. That pressure on the land would be a constant throughout its history.
Even so, creating the park so early laid a crucial foundation: the recognition that these volcanoes and their gorillas were a heritage worth protecting. Decades later, that principle would be combined with scientific research and with a tourism model that would transform the relationship between conservation, the economy and local communities. But before that, a woman from the United States would change the fate of the Virunga gorillas forever.
In 1967, the American primatologist Dian Fossey settled in a remote cabin between the Karisimbi and Bisoke volcanoes and founded the Karisoke Research Center. Encouraged by the palaeoanthropologist Louis Leakey —the same man who backed Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees—, Fossey set out to study mountain gorillas in depth. Until then they were little known and feared for their reputation as aggressive beasts. With patience and a pioneering method, she got gorilla families to accept her, and documented their social behaviour, intelligence and tenderness like no one before, debunking the myth of the 'ferocious gorilla'.
Her work showed the world what these animals were really like, but also how serious the threats they faced were: poaching, snares and habitat loss. Fossey became a fierce, uncompromising defender of the gorillas, confronting poachers with radical methods. The killing of Digit, her most beloved gorilla, by poachers in 1978 marked her deeply and hardened her crusade even further. Her story reached a wide audience through her book 'Gorillas in the Mist' (1983) and the 1988 film of the same name, starring Sigourney Weaver.
On 26 December 1985, Dian Fossey was found murdered in her cabin at Karisoke, a crime that has never been fully solved and was probably linked to her fight against poaching and the interests opposed to it. She was buried on the spot, in the gorilla cemetery she had created, next to Digit and other fallen animals. Her legacy, however, lived on: the organisation she founded, now the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, continues to study and protect the gorillas, and her name is forever tied to these mountains.
The 1990s were devastating for the region and for the park. The civil war that began in 1990, when the Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded the country from the north —right through the volcano area—, turned this border region into a battleground. The Karisoke Research Center was looted and destroyed, and research came to a halt. Then came the 1994 genocide and, after it, the huge refugee crisis that spilled over into the Congo, with millions of people and armed groups settled near the Virungas.
During those years, the park became practically ungovernable. Insecurity, the presence of militias, poaching and pressure on natural resources put the survival of the mountain gorillas at serious risk; their population, already small, had been shrinking throughout the 20th century. On both sides of the border, rangers and conservationists risked —and in many cases lost— their lives protecting the animals amid the chaos. It was, without doubt, the lowest point in the history of the park and its gorillas.
That the mountain gorillas survived such a storm is almost a miracle, the result of many people's determination under the worst conditions. When Rwanda began to stabilise in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the country had to rebuild the park's protection and its tourism almost from scratch. Out of that rebuilding came the model that today makes the Virunga gorillas a global symbol of successful conservation.
From the early 21st century, Rwanda committed firmly to a 'high-value, low-volume' gorilla tourism model: expensive, strictly limited permits —now USD 1.500 per person, a small number of habituated families and a maximum of eight visitors per group per day— that minimise the impact on the animals while generating significant income. By law, part of that income goes to the communities around the park through a revenue-sharing programme that funds schools, health centres, drinking water and income-generating projects. That way, the neighbours have a direct stake in the gorillas thriving.
That change of logic —from poaching to protection, from a community at odds with the park to a community that benefits from it— is the key to its success. Projects such as the Gorilla Guardians cultural village, which brings in former poachers who have found a new livelihood, and the scientific work of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, now based at its modern Ellen DeGeneres Campus in Musanze (2022), round out a conservation ecosystem admired around the world. Every year, the Kwita Izina ceremony, inspired by the Rwandan tradition of naming newborns, publicly names the gorilla babies born in the park, in a celebration that honours the achievements of conservation and puts them in the spotlight.
The results are remarkable: the mountain gorilla is one of the very few great apes whose population is growing, to the point that its conservation status improved from 'critically endangered' to 'endangered'. Volcanoes National Park has also become the engine of Rwandan tourism and an emblem of the 'new Rwanda'. For travellers, understanding this history —Dian Fossey, the genocide, the revival— transforms the encounter with the gorillas: it is not just a spectacular nature experience, but the culmination of one of the most inspiring conservation stories on the planet.
