Lake Manyara National Park

Overview

Lake Manyara National Park is one of Tanzania's most compact and yet surprisingly diverse wildlife destinations — a narrow strip of land between the dramatic Rift Valley escarpment and the soda shores of Lake Manyara, covering just 325 square kilometres but harbouring exceptional wildlife and one of East Africa's most famous animal behavioural curiosities: lions that climb trees. The park was immortalised by Ernest Hemingway in The Green Hills of Africa, and its tree-climbing lions — large prides that regularly lounge in the branches of acacia and sycamore fig trees — have fascinated wildlife biologists and delighted visitors for decades. While tree-climbing lion behaviour occurs in a few other locations across Africa, Manyara's lions do so with a frequency and regularity that makes sightings relatively predictable for patient visitors. Lake Manyara itself is an alkaline soda lake that periodically hosts hundreds of thousands of lesser flamingos, turning the lake shore spectacular pink; even when flamingo concentrations are lower, the shores support pelicans, marabou storks, yellow-billed storks and hundreds of other waterbird species. The park's habitat diversity is remarkable for its size — groundwater forest at the escarpment base shelters olive baboons, blue monkeys and red-tailed monkeys, open savannah and acacia woodland support elephant, impala, zebra and giraffe, and the lake margins draw hippopotamus, water mongoose and a staggering diversity of aquatic birds. Manyara's richness makes it a perfect opening or closing chapter for any Tanzania northern circuit, complementing the Serengeti and Ngorongoro with its intimate, accessible scale.