Nimule National Park is the green exception at the far south of South Sudan: 410 square kilometres of wooded savanna, hills and riverine forest crossed by the White Nile, right where the country ends and Uganda begins. It was created in 1954, seven years before today's South Sudan… in fact, decades before it existed, when all of this was still Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and it is now the oldest and —on paper— most accessible national park in the country.
What makes it different is not its size but the water. In Nimule, the safari is done by boat: you sail the Nile among hippos and crocodiles to Opekoloe Island, where the elephants gather, and from there you walk with rangers to the Fola Falls, the point where the river is squeezed into a gorge and roars. It is one of the few organised nature experiences that has ever existed in South Sudan, and it worked —when it worked— as a one- or two-day trip from Juba along the country's only paved road.
Let's be blunt: today this is an information sheet, not an itinerary. South Sudan is at the highest alert level of practically every foreign ministry, the 2018 peace agreement is going through its most fragile moment since it was signed, and the Juba–Nimule road, the access route, is among the roads flagged as dangerous in official advisories. This guide explains what Nimule is, why it matters and what it means for the country, in the hope that one day it can be talked about in the present tense again.
Nimule National Park was declared in 1954, in the final years of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, to protect the stretch of the White Nile that enters the country from Uganda and the wildlife associated with it, especially elephants. The town of Nimule was already an unavoidable crossing point back then: this is where navigation on the Nile is broken by the Fola Falls, and where the historic overland route between Uganda and southern Sudan passes. The two Sudanese civil wars —1955-1972 and 1983-2005— turned the area into a war corridor, refuge and frontier, and poaching decimated the wildlife. The park reopened to the public in 2008, in the period of peace following the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, and in 2012 the opening of the paved Juba–Nimule road put it less than three hours from the capital. The South Sudanese civil war that began in December 2013 interrupted that process again, and with it both the budding tourism and the hydroelectric project planned at the Fula Falls.
Read the full history ↓Where the Nile enters the country through rapids and mountains: Ma'di land, the Nimule park created in 1954, the Fola falls and the road the South Sudanese economy depends on.
Read the history of The south: the border with Uganda →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Nimule National Park protects the exact spot where the Nile flows from Uganda into what is now South Sudan. Upstream, the river comes from Lake Albert and the system of great equatorial lakes; downstream, it will cross the country's vast plain until it loses itself in the Sudd. In between lies a step: the land drops from the highlands of the rift down to the clay plain at the centre of the country, and the river gets past it through a series of rapids and falls, with the Fola Falls as the most violent stretch.
That step explains almost everything else. It explains why the Nile is not continuously navigable from Uganda to Khartoum, why Nimule was for more than a century an unavoidable transfer point between boat and caravan, and why the town ended up as the great overland gateway to the south. It also explains the park's ecology: the river opens a corridor of gallery forest through the wooded savannah, with islands, backwaters and sandbanks that draw wildlife all year round.
The park's terrain combines that river plain with scattered rocky hills (the southern edge of the great shield that dominates the landscape of the country's south) and patches of Combretum and Terminalia savannah. The rains fall roughly between April and November, and for the rest of the year the savannah dries out, the vegetation thins and the animals move closer to the water. That seasonal rhythm set the pace of the place long before there was a border, a road or a park.
The land has historically belonged to the Madi people, farmers and fishers of the Nile valley whose territory was split in two by the line drawn between Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and the Uganda Protectorate. To the east live the Acholi, and towards Juba, the Bari. None of these communities stopped using the river when the park was declared: coexistence between the protected area and local communities has been an open question here from day one.
For thousands of years, the Nile was a geographical mystery. The pharaohs never managed to trace it to its source; in AD 61, according to classical sources, an expedition of Roman soldiers sent by Nero came to a halt at the Sudd swamp, far to the north of here. The geography of the upper Nile stayed blank on European maps until well into the 19th century.
The opening came from the north and by water. Between 1839 and 1842, the Ottoman naval officer Salim Qapudan led three river expeditions sent by Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, to force a way through the Sudd and find the sources of the Nile. The first left Khartoum in November 1839 and reached Bor; the second set out in November 1840 and reached Gondokoro (next to present-day Juba) in January 1841. None of them found the sources, but they opened the river to navigation as far as the south of the country, and in doing so they unleashed the expansion of the ivory and slave trade by Ottoman-Egyptian and European merchants.
Above Gondokoro, the river stops being a route. The rapids that begin around Nimule and peak at the Fola Falls forced travellers to go ashore and continue overland. That is where the logistics hub that gave rise to the town of Nimule took shape: the end point for navigation from the north and the starting point for caravans heading south towards Lake Albert. The British explorers of the second half of the 19th century (Samuel Baker and his wife Florence, and later Charles Gordon as governor of Equatoria) passed through this corridor and described it.
Once the maps were filled in and the colonial carve-up was settled, that line of rapids also became a political line: the border between Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and the Uganda Protectorate was drawn very close by. Nimule became a border and customs town, a role it has never lost.
Nimule National Park was declared in 1954, in the dying days of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Sudan would become independent in January 1956, and South Sudan fifty-five years later. That makes Nimule an unusual case: a protected area older than both of the states that went on to run it.
The motivation was typical of the time. British colonial administrations in East Africa had been creating reserves and parks since the 1930s and 1940s to curb commercial hunting and protect flagship wildlife, with elephants at the top of the list. Nimule ticked every box: a stable population of elephants tied to the Nile corridor, a spectacular natural feature (the Fola Falls) and a manageable area of around 410 square kilometres, within which management sources distinguish a core of about 256 km² and a buffer zone of about 154 km². Other publications give a total area of 540 km², a discrepancy that shows how unsettled the country's official mapping still is.
Over time, the park was classified as International Union for Conservation of Nature Category II (a national park in the strict sense) and recognised as an Important Bird Area of South Sudan, thanks to its rich mosaic of river, gallery forest and savannah.
Protection, however, came with very little peace ahead of it. In August 1955, just a year after the park was declared and months before Sudan's independence, the mutiny of the Torit garrison sparked the First Sudanese Civil War. The south entered a conflict that, with a truce between 1972 and 1983, would drag on for half a century.
The two Sudanese civil wars (the first between 1955 and 1972, the second between 1983 and 2005) shaped the park's fate more than any conservation decision. The second one actually started just over three hundred kilometres from here: on 16 May 1983, Battalion 105 mutinied at the Malual-Chaat barracks in Bor, and that spark gave birth to the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA).
Nimule ended up at the centre of it all because of where it sits. It was the gateway to Uganda, and therefore a route for supplies, for refuge and for return. Hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese crossed here on their way to the refugee camps of northern Uganda; the local Madi population was displaced en masse and came back later. For years the town hosted camps for internally displaced people and served as a logistics base for humanitarian organisations.
For wildlife, half a century of war meant two things: an abundance of automatic weapons and the collapse of any managing authority. Hunting (for subsistence among displaced, hungry people, and commercially for ivory) decimated large mammal populations across the south of the country, and Nimule was no exception. South Sudan's elephants, which numbered in the tens of thousands in the 1970s, were reduced to small, scattered groups.
Against that backdrop, the survival of a herd of around seventy elephants associated with Opekoloe Island, inside the park, is remarkable news. The river, the islands and the cross-border nature of the area (the animals move between South Sudan and Uganda) helped that group hold on while elephants died out locally in other parts of the country.
The Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in January 2005 ended the second civil war and opened the most hopeful period in the region's recent history. In 2008, Nimule National Park reopened to the public and work began on rebuilding its wildlife populations. For the first time in decades there were rangers, boats and visitors.
The decisive push came in 2012, with South Sudan independent since July 2011. That year the Juba–Nimule road opened: 192 kilometres of tarmac built with US government funding through USAID for around 225 million dollars, the country's first paved road. The trip between the capital and the Ugandan border went from about eight hours to under three. All of a sudden, Nimule was a weekend destination from Juba and the only South Sudanese national park you could reach by car without mounting an expedition.
In those years a small tourism scene emerged: operators running one- or two-day trips, boat safaris on the Nile, walks to the Fola Falls, birdwatching. Visitors were never numerous (South Sudan has never had mass tourism), but the trade was real, and it supported jobs and a budget for the park.
In December 2013, the political rupture in Juba triggered the South Sudanese Civil War and everything came to a halt. Tourism vanished, conservation resources were diverted or ran dry, and the Fula hydroelectric project, planned as the country's flagship energy scheme on the park's rapids, was frozen because of insecurity, as the sector's own documentation acknowledges.
Nimule National Park reaches the present with three open issues on the table. The first is security. The 2018 revitalised peace agreement was never fully implemented, and in March 2025 the house arrest of First Vice President Riek Machar pushed the agreement to its most fragile point, according to the process's own monitors. The main foreign ministries keep the country at their highest alert level: the US Department of State at Level 4 “Do Not Travel”, the British FCDO advising against all travel to the whole country (guidance updated on 26 May 2026), and Spain's Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a blunt «se desaconseja el viaje bajo cualquier circunstancia» (travel is advised against under any circumstances).
The second issue is the dam. The government is pressing ahead with plans to build its main hydroelectric power station on the Fula rapids, inside the park; the feasibility study has been completed, and in March 2026 the Minister of Energy and Dams toured the site with a European Union delegation, a sign that the project is still alive. For a country with minimal electrification, the scheme holds out a huge promise of development. What would be left of the falls and the park's ecosystem if it goes ahead is a question that has had no detailed public answer.
The third is the wider conservation picture, and it is the best news. In 2023, the first comprehensive aerial wildlife survey in South Sudan's history, carried out by African Parks with the government between 28 April and 15 May, documented a migration of almost six million antelope in the Boma and Bandingilo parks (around five million white-eared kob, close to 300,000 tiang, 350,000 Mongalla gazelle and 160,000 reedbuck), the largest land mammal migration on the planet. The finding put South Sudan on the global conservation map and gave its network of parks, Nimule included, an argument it never had before.
Today Nimule is what it has always been: a bottleneck. Through it pass the river, the trucks, the people coming and going from Uganda, and the elephants that cross the border without ever noticing it exists. It is at once South Sudan's oldest park and the one closest to what the country could offer if it ever becomes stable. For now, this guide tells its story in the past tense and the conditional.
