Gola Rainforest National Park is Sierra Leone's great green treasure: almost 710 km² of lowland tropical rainforest on the border with Liberia, the largest remnant of Upper Guinean forest left in the country. It is a world of giant trees, lianas and mist, home to extraordinary biodiversity: more than 330 bird species, western chimpanzees, forest elephants, pygmy hippos, Diana monkeys and the coveted white-necked rockfowl, one of the most sought-after birds on the continent.
Gola is not a classic safari park: it is a dense forest where wildlife is elusive and the reward lies in the immersion, the birdwatching and the experience of walking through one of the richest and most threatened ecosystems in West Africa. Managed in partnership between the Government of Sierra Leone, the Conservation Society of Sierra Leone (CSSL) and the British RSPB, together with local communities, it is a conservation model that turns protecting the forest into a benefit for the people who live around it.
This guide explains how to visit Gola: how to get there from Kenema via Lalehun, how to arrange permits and guides with the park administration, which hikes and birdwatching outings to do (including the search for the rockfowl), where to sleep in the lodges and community camps, and why this border rainforest, now part of the country's first World Heritage Site, is worth the effort of getting there.
The area that is now the park was declared a forest reserve in the 1920s and logged for timber for decades, peaking in the 1980s. After years of conservation work led by the CSSL and the RSPB, and after the civil war, the Government of Sierra Leone created Gola Rainforest National Park by law in 2010-2011, the country's second. It is managed as a project that combines conservation of the Upper Guinean forest with community development. In 2025, together with Tiwai Island, it was inscribed by UNESCO as Sierra Leone's first World Heritage Site.
Read the full history ↓The eastern province of cocoa, coffee and diamonds: Kenema, a city of markets, and the Gola rainforest, the largest lowland tropical forest in the country.
Read the history of The east and the rainforests →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand Gola, you need to look at the big map of West Africa. Thousands of years ago, a great belt of humid tropical rainforest (the Upper Guinean Forest) stretched almost unbroken from Guinea and Sierra Leone to Togo. It was a remarkably rich and unique ecosystem, separated from the Congo rainforest block by the so-called 'Dahomey Gap'. That forest was home to extraordinary biodiversity, with countless endemic species.
Today, after centuries of clearing for farming, logging and resource extraction, that great forest has been reduced to scattered fragments, most of them degraded. The Gola forest, in eastern Sierra Leone, is one of the largest and best-preserved fragments left: some 710 km² of lowland rainforest, the largest remnant of this biome in the country. It is recognised as a global biodiversity 'hotspot' and a priority for international conservation.
On the border with Liberia, Gola is part of a larger cross-border forest landscape. On the Liberian side lies the Gola/Foya forest, and the whole area connects with other protected areas in the region. Protecting Gola isn't just about saving a national forest. It means conserving one of the last large pieces of an ecosystem that was once vast and now hangs by a thread.
Gola's formal history as a designated area begins in the colonial era. In the 1920s, the British declared the area the Gola forest reserves, but with a very different goal from today's. The aim wasn't to conserve biodiversity but to manage the forest as a timber resource, so the reserve was designed to regulate and make use of logging.
Commercial logging in the Gola forests began in the 1930s and grew over time, peaking in the 1980s. For decades the forest was a source of timber, with added pressure from farming by surrounding communities and, across the wider region, from mining. Naturalists knew how biologically rich the place was, but the forest was still treated essentially as a log quarry.
That model began to change towards the end of the 20th century, as awareness grew of the unique value of the Upper Guinean forest and of how quickly it was disappearing. National and international conservationists set their sights on Gola as one of the last large blocks that was worth saving, and urgently. But before that effort could take shape, the country descended into war.
The conservation push for Gola was built around an alliance that would prove key: the Conservation Society of Sierra Leone (CSSL), the UK's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the Government's Forestry Division, together with the local chiefdoms and communities. The goal was to protect the forest while making sure its conservation benefited the surrounding communities rather than harming them.
The 1991-2002 civil war hit the east of the country hard and halted these efforts. Paradoxically, though, the insecurity also slowed some of the logging, and the forest survived. Once the war was over, the conservation project picked up again in earnest, with international funding and a pioneering approach: paying communities and chiefdoms to conserve the forest, developing economic alternatives (such as shade-grown cocoa) and setting up research and ecotourism programmes.
This is how Gola went from timber reserve to flagship community-based conservation project. The RSPB embraced it as its 'Forest of Hope', largely because of its exceptional birdlife, with the white-necked rockfowl as its flagship species. Years of work laid the groundwork for the big institutional step that would come in the early 2010s.
Official recognition finally came in the early 2010s. Gola Rainforest National Park was declared by President Ernest Bai Koroma and established by an act of the Parliament of Sierra Leone in December 2010, and it was officially opened on 3 December 2011. It was only the country's second national park, a milestone in Sierra Leone's environmental policy and the result of years of conservation work.
The park protects some 71,000 hectares (710 km²) of lowland rainforest, managed jointly by the Government of Sierra Leone, the CSSL and the RSPB under a model that ensures local communities benefit directly from conservation. Community guides, village guesthouses, research programmes and a budding ecotourism scheme were set up, along with compensation and development schemes for the surrounding chiefdoms.
Gola thus became a model for how a tropical forest can be conserved in a poor, post-war country: not by fencing the forest off from its people, but by making the community both the driving force behind its protection and the one that benefits from it. The park protects an astonishing range of wildlife: more than 330 bird species, chimpanzees, forest elephants, pygmy hippos, Diana monkeys and the lush plant life of the Upper Guinean forest.
Gola's international recognition came in July 2025. At its 47th session, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee inscribed the 'Gola-Tiwai Complex', made up of Gola Rainforest National Park and nearby Tiwai Island, on the World Heritage List. It was Sierra Leone's first World Heritage Site, a historic recognition for a country that had long been associated with war and blood diamonds.
The inscription recognises the outstanding universal value of these remnants of the Upper Guinean forest: their extraordinary biodiversity, their role as a refuge for threatened species and how well they represent an endangered biome. It also implicitly recognises the community conservation model that has made it possible to protect them. For Sierra Leone, the listing was a source of national pride and a showcase for its natural heritage to the world.
Today, Gola brings together the layers of its history: the colonial timber reserve, the forest logged for decades, the conservation project that rescued it, the national park created in 2011 and the UNESCO site recognised in 2025. For travellers, exploring Gola means stepping into a heritage that belongs to all humanity, one of the last great Upper Guinean forests. Every visit also helps give this green treasure, and the communities who look after it, a future.
