About the park
South Luangwa: where the walking safari was invented
Nine thousand square kilometres at the southern end of the Great Rift Valley, built around one of Africa's last unaltered major rivers, and home to three animals that exist nowhere else on earth.
A river with no dams
The Luangwa is a major tributary of the Zambezi and one of the biggest genuinely unaltered river systems left in southern Africa: no dams, no significant abstraction. It floods in the rains and falls hard in the dry season, and as it meanders it abandons channels, leaving behind the oxbow lagoons that make this valley such concentrated game country.
The park runs along the western bank for 9,050 square kilometres, backed by the Muchinga Escarpment, at the southern terminus of the East African Rift. Mfuwe, just outside the eastern boundary, is the gateway village.
Where the walking safari began
In the 1950s Norman Carr, a British conservationist central to the park's creation, did something nobody had done: he set aside tribal land as a reserve, opened the first public game-viewing camp in what was then Northern Rhodesia, and made a deal that profits would go back to the community. Guests shot with cameras rather than rifles, and the photographic and walking safari were born here.
That lineage is unbroken. Carr taught Phil Berry, who still guides in this valley. Nsefu Camp, which Carr built in 1951, is Zambia's first permanent safari camp and now a national monument. Every walk in the park still goes out with a guide and an armed scout, exactly as it did then.
Three animals found nowhere else
The Rift Valley escarpment isolated this valley long enough for its animals to diverge. Seeing all three in a single trip is a genuine collector's set, and the giraffes at least are effectively guaranteed since their density peaks close to permanent water, which is exactly where the camps are.
| Animal | What makes it unique |
|---|---|
| Thornicroft's giraffe | Endemic to this valley and found nowhere else on earth. Around 650 to 890 remain, and there are none in captivity anywhere |
| Cookson's wildebeest | The valley's own wildebeest subspecies, and the largest of the blue wildebeest forms. Probably fewer than 4,000 left |
| Crawshay's zebra | Very narrow stripes with no shadow lines, and uniquely among zebras its lower incisors lack an infundibulum |
Who runs it, and who protects it
The park is managed by Zambia's Department of National Parks and Wildlife, working alongside Conservation South Luangwa, a local NGO with 112 community scouts on patrol, Zambia's first conservation dog unit, aerial surveillance and a 24-hour wildlife veterinary service. Their operating area covers 1.4 million hectares including the surrounding game management areas.
When you stay inside the park, part of what you pay each night goes to the Luangwa Community and Conservation Fund, bundled into the levies your camp charges. It is one of the more direct links between a safari bill and boots on the ground.