Queen Elizabeth National Park is the jewel of Uganda's safaris: the most visited, the most varied and one of the most beautiful parks in the country. It was named after Queen Elizabeth II following her visit in 1954. The park spreads across the Equator between Lake Edward and Lake George, with the snow-capped Rwenzori Mountains behind, in a patchwork of golden savannah, wetlands full of life, volcanic craters and forests that are home to chimpanzees.
Its great symbol is the Kazinga Channel, a natural waterway linking the two lakes that holds one of Africa's highest densities of hippos, buffalo, elephants and birds. A boat cruise along its banks is one of the must-do experiences in Uganda. On top of that come the famous fig-tree-climbing lions of the Ishasha sector, a rarity seen in only a couple of places on the continent, and the chimpanzees living in the deep forested Kyambura Gorge.
This Queen Elizabeth safari guide explains how the park works and what the Uganda Wildlife Authority charges, when to go, where to see lions and the big savannah wildlife, how to do the Kazinga cruise and the chimpanzee trek, what the crater lakes and the Katwe salt lake are, and how to combine this park with the Bwindi gorillas and the Kibale chimpanzees for the classic western Uganda circuit.
For centuries the land between Lake Edward and Lake George belonged to herders and fishermen, and it was first protected as a game reserve. The park was created in 1952 as Kazinga National Park and was renamed Queen Elizabeth National Park in 1954 after Queen Elizabeth II's visit. During the 20th century it suffered from poaching, and its elephant populations collapsed during the war years of the 1970s and 80s. It has since recovered to become, once again, Uganda's richest and most visited park. That story, from a fishermen's kingdom to a great safari park, is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The west of the Toro kingdom: tree-climbing lions and the Kazinga Channel in Queen Elizabeth, chimpanzees in Kibale, and the Mountains of the Moon, with glaciers on the equator in the Rwenzori.
Read the history of The west: safaris and primates →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The landscape of Queen Elizabeth National Park is the child of one of the planet's great geological forces: the Great Rift Valley, whose western branch (the Albertine Rift) runs through this part of Uganda, slowly pulling the African continent apart. That fracture in the Earth's crust created the basins where Lakes Edward and George lie today, raised the Rwenzori Mountains that dominate the horizon and scattered dozens of volcanic craters across the region, remnants of explosive eruptions that took place thousands of years ago.
Lakes Edward and George, joined by the natural Kazinga Channel, are the backbone of the park. Lake George is shallow and warm, fed by rivers flowing down from the Rwenzori, while Lake Edward, larger and deeper, is shared with the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo. Between the two, the Kazinga Channel — a stretch of water about 32 km long — acts as a giant natural watering hole that draws wildlife together and explains the area's extraordinary biological richness.
Add to all that water a varied terrain: rolling savannah, wetlands, crater fields dotted with round lakes, tropical forests such as Maramagambo, and the Kichwamba escarpment dropping down to the plain. The park also sits right on the Equator, a fact marked by a monument on the road. That range of habitats, packed into a relatively small area, is why Queen Elizabeth is Uganda's most biodiverse park.
Long before the park existed, this land of lakes was home to communities that lived off its resources. Fishing villages grew up along the shores of Lakes Edward and George and the Kazinga Channel, and they still survive today as enclaves inside the park — the so-called 'fishing villages', such as Katunguru or Kasenyi — where life revolves around canoes and fishing for tilapia and lungfish.
At Lake Katwe, a salt lake in one of the region's volcanic craters, a unique activity developed centuries ago: salt extraction. Local communities learned to work the lake's hypersaline waters by dividing it into evaporation pans and scraping off the salt crust. It is gruelling work, passed down from generation to generation, and it turned Katwe into an important salt-trading centre in the Great Lakes region long before the Europeans arrived.
Herding peoples also grazed their cattle on the surrounding plains, and the area was part of the old kingdoms of western Uganda, such as Toro and Ankole. This deep human presence explains why the park, unlike others, still has inhabited villages within its borders: when the land was protected, not all communities were moved out, and today fishers, salt miners and guides live alongside the wildlife in a delicate balance.
Formal protection of the area began in the mid-20th century, in the final years of British colonial rule. In 1952 the national park was created under the name Kazinga National Park, after the channel that forms its backbone. The aim was to protect the region's extraordinary concentration of wildlife — elephants, hippos, buffalo, lions — and to manage land where wildlife and human communities lived side by side.
The current name came two years later. In 1954 the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom visited Uganda, then a British protectorate, and the park was renamed Queen Elizabeth National Park in her honour. The name outlived Uganda's independence in 1962 (apart from a brief spell in the 1970s, when Idi Amin's regime renamed it Rwenzori National Park) and remains one of the country's best-known tourism brands today.
In its early decades the park was a thriving safari destination and an important centre for ecological research: scientists from around the world studied its elephant and hippo populations and the dynamics of its savannahs and lakes. The Mweya Peninsula, with its lodge and research station, became the heart of the park.
Like the rest of Uganda, Queen Elizabeth National Park suffered badly during the years of dictatorship, war and instability in the 1970s and 1980s. Idi Amin's regime (1971-1979) and the wars that followed plunged the country into chaos, and protected areas were left at the mercy of unchecked poaching. Soldiers, hunters and traffickers decimated the wildlife: elephant numbers collapsed because of the ivory trade, and many other species came close to disappearing from the park.
The elephant was perhaps the most dramatic case: from several thousand animals, the population fell to just a few hundred in the worst years. Hippos, buffalo and antelope also suffered enormously. The tourism infrastructure fell into ruin, and for a time the park, once Uganda's pride, was practically abandoned and emptied of life.
With the return of stability from the late 1980s, under the new government, a slow but remarkable recovery began. The creation of the Uganda Wildlife Authority, better anti-poaching patrols and the revival of tourism allowed wildlife populations to rebuild little by little. Elephants began to multiply again, lions and hippos thrived, and Queen Elizabeth regained its place as the country's most visited and most biodiverse park, a symbol of the resilience of Uganda's natural world.
Today Queen Elizabeth National Park is the star of Uganda's safaris and one of the most complete protected areas in East Africa. Managed by the Uganda Wildlife Authority, it brings together in a single destination a savannah safari with lions and elephants, the boat cruise on the Kazinga Channel — one of the best water-based wildlife experiences on the continent — chimpanzee trekking in the Kyambura Gorge, world-class birdwatching (more than 600 species) and landscapes that range from savannah to volcanic craters and tropical forest.
The park is famous for its rarities: the tree-climbing lions of Ishasha, which lounge in fig trees and can only be seen in a couple of places in Africa; the chimpanzees living in a gorge sunk into the middle of the savannah; and the communities of fishers and salt miners who live within its boundaries, bringing a human dimension to the experience. All of it straddling the Equator, with the snow-capped Rwenzori as a backdrop.
Thanks to its strategic position, between the chimpanzees of Kibale to the north and the gorillas of Bwindi to the south, Queen Elizabeth is the centrepiece of the great western Uganda circuit followed by travellers from all over the world. Its story — from a land of fishers and salt miners to a colonial park, from near collapse during the war to recovery — sums up the story of conservation in Uganda: a country that came close to losing its wildlife and, against all odds, managed to bring it back and turn it into one of its greatest treasures.
