Eden Again

Peace park in Mozambique paints a picture of a prosperous future in conservation and tourism

- Keri Harvey

Zinave National Park in central southern Mozambique covers over 400,000 hectares of evocative wilderness. If you love the atmosphere of old Africa, and want to savour silence and enjoy truly wild places, your soul will sing in Zinave.

For more information, go to peaceparks.org.

Forests of ancient ironwoods and lime-barked fever trees, swathes of waving green savannah, burly baobabs and lazy lakes. It’s a bucolic scene, and the Savé River runs through it. Zinave National Park is a primeval Eden of tangled trees, with increasing wildlife and plenty of waterbirds. Little has been touched here for decades, but now, the massive park is being restored to splendour and is arguably Mozambique’s best-kept secret.

Fly in on a charter flight from Vilankulos, on the coast, and have an aerial perspective on Zinave. It’s beautiful from the air, but at ground level it’s God’s own garden – magnificent and unspoiled by tourism. Zinave has been a national park since 1972, but the 12-year civil war that ended in 1992 decimated wildlife there. The Peace Parks Foundation (PPF) signed a co-management agreement with the Mozambique government and started work in 2016 to jointly develop Zinave as an integral part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area (TFCA). One of the aims of the TFCA is to restore wildlife migratory routes by stitching together ecosystems in South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

Heading deeper into the park the day after we arrived, PPF Project Manager for Zinave, Bernard van Lente, stops the Land Cruiser and points to an abandoned heap of false mopane trees cut into long poles.