Hwange National Park is the wild heart of Zimbabwe: at almost 15,000 km², roughly the size of Belgium, it is the country's largest park and one of the great wildlife sanctuaries of the whole African continent. It is home to the Big Five (lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo and rhino), more than a hundred mammal species and some 400 bird species, in a mosaic of sandy savannah on the edge of the Kalahari, teak woodland and plains dotted with waterholes.
But if there is one thing Hwange is famous for, it's its elephants: more than 40,000 of them, one of the largest populations on the planet. In the dry season, the sight of hundreds of elephants gathering at sunset at a waterhole like Nyamandhlovu, among herds of buffalo, zebra, giraffe and sable antelope, with lions lying in wait, is one of the great spectacles of African nature. All this in a park that, barely a century ago, had been almost emptied of wildlife by hunting.
This guide takes a practical look at Hwange: when to go depending on the wildlife, how to get there from Victoria Falls or Bulawayo, which areas and camps to choose (from the public ZimParks camps to the luxury lodges in the private concessions), what 4x4, walking and night safaris are like, and the park's history, from the colonial hunting ground of 'Wankie' to the sanctuary that the death of Cecil the lion made known around the world. A must for anyone looking for a great African safari.
For centuries the Hwange region was a hunting ground of the Ndebele kings and the territory of Nambya and San communities, in semi-arid land on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. In 1928 the government of Southern Rhodesia declared it a game reserve, the Wankie Game Reserve, and appointed a 22-year-old, Ted Davison, as its first warden. He ran it for 33 years, and his great achievement was drilling artificial waterholes that brought wildlife back to an almost empty territory. In 1950 it became a national park. In 2015, the killing by a hunter of Cecil the lion, one of its most famous animals, caused worldwide outrage. Its full story is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The smoke that thunders and the country's greatest elephant sanctuary: from the roar of Mosi-oa-Tunya to the herds of Hwange, the north-west holds Zimbabwe's most famous wonders.
Read the history of Victoria Falls and the north-west →If you only have one day, take a guided tour on the first one: it sets up the rest of your trip and saves you a lot of walking. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 10 activities in Victoria Falls. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
They depart from Victoria Falls, 145 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before it became a national park, the vast semi-arid region that Hwange covers today was a land of sand, teak and mopane on the north-eastern edge of the Kalahari Desert, short of permanent surface water but rich in wildlife. San (Bushmen) communities, hunter-gatherers with deep roots in the area, moved across these lands, along with Nambya and Tonga peoples, who knew every seasonal waterhole and every 'pan' (a depression that holds water in the wet season).
In the 19th century, as the powerful Ndebele kingdom expanded from the south, the area became a royal hunting reserve. King Mzilikazi and later his son Lobengula used these wild lands as a hunting ground, a territory teeming with elephants, buffalo and large antelope. The park's very name, 'Hwange' (once spelt 'Wankie' by the settlers), comes from that of a local Nambya chief, Hwange Rosumbani.
The arrival of European settlers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries changed everything. Intensive hunting, first for subsistence and trade and later for sport, decimated the region's wildlife. By the 1920s, after decades of slaughter, the elephant population had fallen to fewer than a thousand animals, and black and white rhinos had been all but wiped out. What had once been a reserve brimming with life was on the verge of emptiness.
The turning point came in 1928, when the government of Southern Rhodesia, pushed by a few legislators aware of the destruction of wildlife, decided to protect the area and declared the Wankie Game Reserve. As its first warden it appointed a young man of just 22, Ted Davison, who until then had worked on tsetse fly control. Davison would remain at the head of the reserve for 33 years and become the chief architect of the modern park.
Davison covered much of the immense territory on foot during 1928 and 1929 and found, to his dismay, that wildlife was almost non-existent: hunting had emptied it. He soon understood the key to the problem and its solution: water. In that semi-arid land, with no permanent rivers, animals could only survive the long dry winter if they had somewhere to drink. So Davison began the great undertaking that would define Hwange: drilling boreholes and pumping water into artificial waterholes spread across the park, creating permanent water points where before there had only been seasonal 'pans'.
That network of waterholes — today more than a hundred, many fed by pumps — transformed the ecology of the place. Wildlife returned and multiplied, and the waterholes became magnets that draw animals together, especially in the dry season. It is one of Hwange's fascinating paradoxes: one of Africa's great natural sanctuaries depends, to sustain its current abundance, on an artificial water infrastructure maintained by people. In 1950, the reserve was upgraded to national park status.
The park's history is intertwined with the colonial development of the region, and in particular with coal and the railway. Near the park lie the large Hwange (Wankie) coalfields, among the most important in southern Africa, which began to be mined in the early 20th century. To serve those mines and the imperial project of linking Bulawayo with Victoria Falls and beyond, the railway line was laid that still runs along the park's northern boundary today, with stations such as Dete.
Throughout the colonial era and up to independence, the park was known as 'Wankie', an English transcription of the name of the Nambya chief Hwange. The neighbouring mining town bore (and in part still bears) that name. After Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, as part of the reclaiming of African place names, both the park and the area came to be written in their correct form, 'Hwange', honouring the memory of the local chief.
That dual presence — the protected nature of the park and the coal and railway industry on its edge — still shapes the region. Mining brought development, but also environmental tensions, and in recent decades there has been concern over extractive projects (such as coal and hydrocarbon exploration) in sensitive areas near the park, which activists and conservationists have fought to protect the wildlife.
In July 2015, Hwange hit front pages around the world because of a tragic episode. Cecil, an imposing male lion with a dark mane, was one of the park's best-known and best-loved animals, followed for years by University of Oxford researchers who had fitted him with a GPS collar to study lion ecology. Cecil was lured outside the park's boundaries and killed by a foreign trophy hunter, in highly questionable circumstances.
The news sparked international outrage unprecedented for a hunting case. Cecil's name became a global symbol of the debate over trophy hunting, the conservation of big cats and the ethics of hunting tourism in Africa. Public pressure led to temporary suspensions of hunting permits and put the spotlight, as never before, on Hwange and the fragility of its predator populations.
Beyond the controversy, the 'Cecil effect' had concrete consequences: it increased attention and funding for conservation in the park, strengthened research and protection projects for lions and wild dogs, and turned Hwange into a case study of how a single animal can transform a global debate. Today, organisations such as the Oxford lion project and Painted Dog Conservation work in the park to protect these iconic species.
Today Hwange National Park is the jewel of Zimbabwe's protected-area system: at almost 15.000 km², it is the country's largest park and one of the great wildlife sanctuaries of southern Africa. It is home to the Big Five, more than a hundred mammal species and some 400 bird species, and above all one of the largest elephant populations on the continent, estimated at more than 40.000 animals. That abundance, concentrated around the waterholes in the dry season, has made it a first-class safari destination.
The park is also part of one of the world's largest transboundary conservation initiatives: the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), which links protected areas in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and Angola, allowing wildlife — especially elephants — to move along ancient migration corridors between countries. Hwange's proximity to Victoria Falls and to Chobe National Park (Botswana) makes it part of a great nature circuit.
The main challenges today are water management (the artificial waterholes depend on pumps and funding, and droughts put them to the test), elephant overpopulation relative to the habitat's capacity, the fight against poaching, and the balance between conservation, tourism and neighbouring communities. From a reserve emptied by hunting to the sanctuary that amazes travellers today, Hwange is proof that nature can be reborn when it is protected, and a reminder of how much remains to be done to conserve it.
