Murchison Falls National Park is the giant among Uganda's parks: the largest, the oldest and one of the most spectacular, crossed by the Nile along one of its most dramatic stretches. Its jewel is the waterfall that gives it its name, where the world's longest river, after crossing half a continent, is choked into a crack just 7 metres wide and roars down a drop considered the most powerful on the planet for the force of its water.
But Murchison is much more than its waterfall: it is a great safari park where the northern savannah fills with elephants, lions, buffalo, Uganda kob and the elegant Rothschild's giraffes (the best place in the world to see them), while the Nile teems with hippos and giant crocodiles. The river cruise to the foot of the falls, past the wildlife on the banks, is one of the most memorable experiences in East Africa.
This Murchison Falls guide explains how the park and its Uganda Wildlife Authority fees work, when to go, how to do the cruise to the falls and the hike to the top, where to see the big savannah wildlife on the north bank, what the delta cruise to look for the shoebill is like, chimpanzee trekking in Budongo Forest, and how to combine the park with Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary on the way from Kampala.
For centuries the Nile and its falls were part of the world of the peoples of northern Uganda, until in 1864 the British explorer Samuel Baker, searching for the source of the Nile, reached the great waterfall and named it Murchison in honour of Roderick Murchison, president of the Royal Geographical Society. The area was protected as a national park in 1952, became one of Africa's great safari destinations and then suffered the devastation of poaching during the war years of the 1970s-80s, when almost all the elephants and rhinos were lost. Since then it has recovered to become the country's star park once again. That story, from the exploration of the Nile to conservation, is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Uganda at its wildest and most remote: at Murchison Falls the Nile bursts through a 7-metre gorge, and in the isolated Kidepo Valley, next to South Sudan, one of Africa's finest savannahs survives.
Read the history of The north: the wild Nile →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The natural history of Murchison is, above all, the story of the Nile. After rising from Lake Victoria at Jinja, the world's longest river crosses Uganda as the Victoria Nile until it reaches this north-western region, where it meets a geological barrier: the edge of the Albertine Rift, the great fracture in the Earth's crust that runs through East Africa. There, hard rock forces the mighty river to squeeze through a cleft barely 7 metres wide, through which it plunges with tremendous force.
That gorge and its drop are the result of millions of years of erosion and of tectonic activity along the Rift. The outcome is one of the most powerful waterfalls on the planet: not the tallest, but one with the greatest force of concentrated water, enough to create a deafening roar and a permanent cloud of spray. Below the falls, the Nile calms down, widens and forms a swampy delta before emptying into Lake Albert. From there it continues its journey north as the Albert Nile, towards Sudan, Egypt and the Mediterranean.
This stretch of the Nile, with its waterfall, its river full of hippos and crocodiles and its delta rich in birdlife, is the axis around which all life in the park is organised. The water draws the wildlife, shapes the routes of safaris and boat cruises, and gives Murchison its unique character as a park crossed by one of the most legendary rivers in human history.
For the European world, the falls entered history in the 1860s, at the height of the race to find the source of the Nile, one of the great geographical puzzles of the age. The British explorer Samuel White Baker, together with his wife Florence (a remarkable woman who joined him on all his expeditions), travelled up the Nile from the north in search of its origins. In 1864 he reached this area, where he 'discovered' for the West the great lake he named Lake Albert and the mighty waterfall.
Baker named the falls Murchison, in honour of Sir Roderick Murchison, then president of the Royal Geographical Society in London, the institution driving the exploration of Africa. It was one of many names European explorers gave to places that African peoples had known and named for centuries, but this is how they were recorded on the maps of the empire. The Bakers' feat, told in their books, made the region famous in Europe.
Those years of exploration, with figures such as Speke, Burton, Livingstone, Stanley and the Bakers, marked the start of European interest in the Great Lakes region, which would eventually lead to colonisation. The Nile and its falls, sought for so long, became symbols of 19th-century geographical adventure, and Murchison Falls was etched into the popular imagination as one of the great landmarks in the exploration of Africa.
In the 20th century, under British colonial rule, the region's extraordinary wealth of wildlife led to its protection. The area was first declared a game reserve and, in 1952, it was established as Murchison Falls National Park, the largest in Uganda and one of the first. In its early decades the park became one of the great safari destinations of East Africa, famous for its huge populations of elephants, hippos, rhinos, giraffes and lions, and for the spectacle of the Nile and its waterfall.
In those golden years, Murchison welcomed distinguished travellers and film stars. Scenes from films were shot here, and figures such as Ernest Hemingway (who survived two light-aircraft crashes nearby in 1954) added to its fame. The historic Paraa Safari Lodge, overlooking the Nile, and the river cruises were symbols of the classic African safari. The park seemed to have it all: abundant wildlife, a legendary river and a spectacular waterfall.
In many ways it was the jewel in the crown of Uganda's parks, a place where African nature showed itself in all its splendour. But that golden age was about to give way to one of the darkest chapters in its history, when politics and war swept over Uganda and, with it, over its wildlife.
The 1970s and 1980s were catastrophic for Murchison, as they were for all of Uganda's wildlife. Idi Amin's dictatorship (1971-1979) and the wars that followed plunged the country into chaos and violence, and the protected areas were left defenceless against large-scale poaching. Soldiers, militiamen and hunters decimated the park's wildlife with automatic weapons: elephants were slaughtered for their ivory, and the rhinos disappeared completely, killed down to the very last one.
Under Amin's regime the park was even renamed Kabalega Falls, after a king of Bunyoro who resisted the British, although it later got its original name back. Animal populations collapsed: of the tens of thousands of elephants and the great herds of other species, only remnants survived. The tourist infrastructure fell into ruin, the lodges decayed, and Murchison, once the pride of East Africa, was left empty and devastated.
The loss of the rhinos was especially symbolic and painful: both the white and the black rhino went extinct across the whole of Uganda during those years. Bringing back that lost wildlife would take decades, and some animals, like the rhinos, could only return through costly reintroduction programmes, such as the one at the Ziwa sanctuary, well into the 21st century. Murchison thus became a painful example of what war and greed can do to nature.
With the return of stability to Uganda from the late 1980s onwards, Murchison began a slow but remarkable recovery. Under the management of the Uganda Wildlife Authority, better anti-poaching patrols, the natural recovery of wildlife and the revival of tourism allowed the park to fill with life again. Elephant numbers grew once more, Rothschild's giraffes thrived to the point of making Murchison their main stronghold in the world, and lions, buffaloes and antelopes rebuilt their populations.
Today Murchison Falls is once again Uganda's star park: the largest, one of the most visited and one of the most complete. In a single destination it offers a savannah safari with lions, elephants and giraffes, the spectacle of the Nile at its most powerful waterfall, boat cruises among hippos and crocodiles, the shoebill of the delta and the chimpanzees of Budongo Forest. Its recovery is one of the great success stories of Ugandan conservation.
The park does face new challenges, though, such as the pressure from oil exploration and extraction in the Lake Albert basin, which raises questions about the future of this ecosystem. Even so, the story of Murchison, from the exploration of the Nile to the golden age of safari, and from the devastation of war to recovery, sums up the journey of conservation in Uganda: a country that came close to losing its most iconic wildlife and that, against all odds, managed to bring its largest park, and the banks of its most legendary river, back to life.
