Serengeti National Park

The Serengeti is where the word “safari” earns its meaning. Established as Tanzania’s first national park, it protects 14,763 square kilometres of short-grass plains, acacia woodland, river valleys and granite kopjes — a landscape so complete that UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site.

Its most famous resident is the Great Migration: well over a million wildebeest, joined by hundreds of thousands of zebra and gazelle, moving in a year-round circle through the ecosystem. Calving floods the southern plains around Ndutu between January and March; the herds then push through the Western Corridor before facing the Mara River in the north between July and October, near Kogatende and Lamai.

But the Serengeti is not only the migration. The Seronera Valley in the central park holds one of the highest concentrations of predators in Africa — lion, leopard and cheetah are seen here year-round, along with all of the Big Five. More than 530 bird species have been recorded, from ostrich to the tiny Fischer’s lovebird.

Distances are real in the Serengeti, and where you sleep matters as much as when you come. We match your camp to the season — southern plains for calving, central for year-round predators, the far north for river crossings — so your game-drive hours are spent among wildlife, not driving to reach it.