Serengeti National Park

About the Park

The Serengeti is not the largest national park in Tanzania, but it is the one that changed how the world thinks about African wildlife. Fourteen thousand square kilometres of open savanna, acacia woodland, and riverine forest support the densest concentration of large predators on the continent. Three thousand lions. A thousand leopards. Cheetah hunting across plains so flat you can watch the chase from start to finish. What defines the Serengeti is movement. The Great Migration — roughly two million wildebeest, half a million zebra, and hundreds of thousands of gazelle — follows a continuous, clockwise loop through the ecosystem. There is no start point and no finish. The herds are always somewhere in the Serengeti, and the predators follow. This single ecological event supports the largest concentration of predator-prey interactions anywhere on earth. For visitors, the Serengeti delivers consistently across all twelve months. The southern plains host the calving season from January to March. The western corridor sees river crossings from June. The northern Serengeti — the dramatic Mara River crossings — peaks from July through September. In my experience, the question is not whether the Serengeti is worth visiting. The question is which part, and when.