Boma is on a scale that is hard to imagine: 22.800 square kilometres of grassland, wetland and savannah in the easternmost corner of South Sudan, next to the Ethiopian border. Declared a national park in 1977, it is one of the largest parks in Africa and the main stage for an antelope migration that, according to the 2023 aerial survey, moves around six million animals.
For decades nobody really knew what was left here. The Second Sudanese Civil War devastated the region (Boma fell to the SPLA on 1 April 1985 and was a guerrilla base for years), and the last reliable surveys dated from the early eighties. When a Wildlife Conservation Society team repeated those flights in 2007, it found that the migration had survived the war: more than 1,3 million white-eared kob, tiang and Mongalla gazelles. Buffalo and elephants, on the other hand, had almost disappeared.
On 26 July 2026, UNESCO inscribed the Boma-Badingilo Migratory Landscape on the World Heritage List (South Sudan's first) and, on the same day and by the same decision, on the List of World Heritage in Danger. A recognition and a diagnosis at the same time.
It needs saying clearly: Boma is not a place you can visit. It lies in a region with recurring intercommunal violence and armed groups present, in a country under the highest alert of almost every foreign ministry, with no tourist infrastructure of any kind. This page tells you what is here (because what is here is extraordinary) and explains honestly why, for now, it is a place to get to know from afar.
Boma National Park was declared in 1977, eight years after the Sudanese government introduced the first serious wildlife legislation for the south, during a brief interlude of peace between the two civil wars. It takes its name from the Boma Plateau, the forested high ground in the east of the park, home to the farming section of the Murle people and one of the few places in the world where native wild Arabica coffee grows, documented there since 1941. The Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005) wiped out any possibility of management: Boma fell to the SPLM/A on 1 April 1985 and the region was caught between garrisons, militias and displacement for twenty years. The Wildlife Conservation Society's 2007 aerial surveys revealed that the great migration had survived, though the buffalo and elephants had not. In 2022 the government signed a ten-year agreement with African Parks to manage Boma and Bandingilo; the comprehensive 2023 survey, announced in June 2024, put the landscape's antelope at around six million. On 26 July 2026, UNESCO inscribed it as World Heritage and, at the same time, as World Heritage in Danger.
Read the full history ↓The arid south-east and the Boma plains: the Torit mutiny that sparked the first civil war, the Toposa of Kapoeta, the Didinga of their mountains and the largest land mammal migration on the planet.
Read the history of The east: the great migration and the Toposa →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Boma National Park covers 22,800 square kilometres at the far eastern end of South Sudan, along the border with Ethiopia. That is more land than the whole of El Salvador, and it makes Boma one of the largest national parks in Africa. It takes its name from the Boma Plateau, the high ground that rises along its eastern flank and breaks the flatness of the plains.
The park is really several landscapes stitched together. The south is short grassland and acacia scrub; the east, combretum and fig woodland; the west, open grassland dotted with seasonal and permanent wetlands that link up with the Jonglei plains and, further on, with the Sudd system. That mix of seasonal water and grass on fertile soils is what supports a mass of grazing animals that is hard to imagine.
The Boma Plateau is a world of its own: altitude, a cooler climate, forest, villages and farming. It is home to one of the most interesting botanical facts in East Africa: native wild populations of Coffea arabica grow there, the species that gives us arabica coffee. They were first documented in 1941 by the botanist A. S. Thomas, who identified wild shrubs on the slopes. These populations are the source of the famous Sudan Rume variety, highly prized for its genetics.
In April 2012, a field team collected 74 samples of wild and cultivated plants from villages and forests on the plateau. A genetic analysis using SSR markers, published in 2021, confirmed South Sudan as a centre of origin for arabica and showed that these populations are genetically distinct from the Ethiopian ones, with a diversity that could be key to improving the crop worldwide. The same researchers warned that the extent and health of these wild populations are declining and that protecting them is urgent.
The park and the land around it are Murle territory. This Nilotic people has historically been organised into two main sections: a farming one, settled on the Boma Plateau and its mountains, and a herding one, in the lowlands and wetlands to the west, around Pibor. That geographic and economic split also shaped their political history.
Other peoples with long ties to these plains live nearby: the Dinka Bor, the Nuer, the Anyuak and, further south, the Toposa. They all share the same structural problem: land that floods and dries out, with resources that shift with the seasons and force people to move. Conflicts over grazing, water and cattle are old. What has changed in recent decades is how deadly they have become, after the civil wars flooded the region with automatic weapons.
During the SPLM/A's fight against the government in Khartoum, the Murle were divided. Most of those in Boma backed the movement, while others fought with Sultan Ismail Konyi's Pibor Defence Force. That internal split, together with repeated intercommunal violence and state military operations at different times, made eastern Jonglei one of the hardest-hit regions in the country.
Any conservation project in Boma has to go through this. African Parks and the government say so openly: the communities of the landscape (Murle, Dinka, Nuer, Anyuak, Toposa) are part of the system, not just the park's surroundings, and could play a central role in any future tourism. Without agreements with them, there will never be enough rangers.
Boma was declared a national park in 1977, during the pause in fighting brought by the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement between the government of Sudan and the Anyanya movement. Those were the only years when the south had its own regional government, based in Juba, and when long-term institutions could be planned. The park was one of them.
The aerial surveys of the early 1980s came out of that short window, and for decades they would be the only reliable reference on the region's wildlife. The 1980 counts estimated 680,716 white-eared kob in Boma during the wet season, along with large populations of tiang, Mongalla gazelle, buffalo, elephant, giraffe and zebra. These were figures on a continental scale.
In 1983, President Gaafar Nimeiry abolished the south's autonomy and extended sharia law to the whole country. The Sudan People's Liberation Army was born, and the Second Sudanese Civil War broke out. The park, which had existed on paper for six years and had no established structure, found itself in the middle of a war zone.
For the next twenty-two years there were no counts, no patrols and no management of any kind. The 1980 figures stayed frozen as the last known data, and it became impossible to say what was really still alive in Boma.
On 1 April 1985, Boma fell to the SPLM/A. It was one of the most significant captures of the early years of the war, and it turned the town and the plateau into the movement's base and rear area in the east of the country, with the Ethiopian border close by. At that stage, Ethiopia was the SPLA's main foreign backer.
Pibor, by contrast, stayed a Sudanese government garrison for almost the whole war, apart from a period of SPLA control between 1987 and 1992. That map of opposing bases, together with the Murle split between those who backed the movement and those who fought with the Pibor Defence Force, kept eastern Jonglei permanently contested.
For the wildlife, twenty years of war meant systematic hunting. Fighters, militias and displaced people found a source of meat in the animals, and a source of money in ivory and trophies. The large, slow and valuable animals were the first to go.
The Comprehensive Peace Agreement of January 2005 finally made it possible to look again. On 17 January 2007, a Wildlife Conservation Society team led by J. Michael Fay and Paul Elkan repeated the 1980s flights over Boma, Jonglei and Southern National Park, using the same method, the same flight lines and the same altitude.
The result cut both ways. On one side was the good news that went around the world: more than 1.3 million white-eared kob, tiang and Mongalla gazelles were still migrating. Fay said he had never seen wildlife in such numbers, not even flying over the Serengeti. On the other side was proof of the disaster: not a single buffalo was seen where around 60,000 had been estimated in 1981, and only one herd of elephants was spotted where some 10,000 had been counted.
Independence in 2011 and the South Sudanese civil war that broke out in December 2013 pushed any management plan back again. The turning point came in August 2022, when the government of South Sudan signed a ten-year renewable agreement with the NGO African Parks to restore and manage Boma and Bandingilo and the landscape that connects them.
Between 16 March and 18 April 2023, GPS collars were fitted to 126 animals from twelve species. That same year saw the first full aerial survey of wildlife, livestock and human activity across the Boma-Bandingilo-Jonglei landscape. The collars revealed extraordinary journeys: the tagged tiang travelled anywhere from about 360 to more than 1,500 kilometres.
The survey results were announced in June 2024 and shook up the study of migrations: around six million antelope, with estimates of about 5,000,000 white-eared kob, 350,000 Mongalla gazelles, 300,000 tiang and 160,000 reedbuck. That is several times the Serengeti-Masai Mara wildebeest migration, which until then had been considered the largest in the world.
On 26 July 2026, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, meeting for its 48th session in Busan (Republic of Korea), added the Boma-Badingilo Migratory Landscape to the World Heritage List through an emergency procedure, and at the same time to the List of World Heritage in Danger. It became South Sudan's first World Heritage site. The property covers about twelve million hectares, and UNESCO named infrastructure development, poaching and wildlife trafficking, amid ongoing insecurity, as threats.
The official statements summed up the moment well. Minister Denay Jock Chagor spoke of years of collaboration between the government, local communities and African Parks. Minister Sarah Nyanath Elijah Yong called it recognition of a landscape whose value goes beyond the country's borders. And Peter Fearnhead, CEO of African Parks, put it plainly: World Heritage status does not protect the landscape on its own, but it puts an international spotlight on it.
In 2026, Boma is still almost as hard to reach as it was in 1985. The difference is that now we know what is inside, and the whole world has found out.
