AS SUMMER SEASON OPENS, GONAREZHOU EMERGES FROM THE SHADOWS, AS THE NEXT GREAT WILDLIFE FRONTIER

As Zimbabwe’s summer tourism season gets underway, safari operators and conservationists are turning fresh attention to Gonarezhou National Park, the country’s least-visited park, but one increasingly tipped to become one of its most compelling wildlife destinations in the years ahead.

Gonarezhou, meaning “place of the elephants” in Shona, sprawls across Zimbabwe’s south-eastern lowveld and remains one of the last great wilderness areas in Southern Africa still relatively untouched by mass tourism. That obscurity, long a byproduct of historical neglect and limited infrastructure, is now beginning to shift, driven by the park’s inclusion in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, a sweeping conservation area linking Gonarezhou with Kruger National Park in South Africa and Limpopo National Park in Mozambique, alongside a public-private partnership overseeing both its commercial and conservation interests.

The management arrangement, run jointly by the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority and the Frankfurt Zoological Society through the Gonarezhou Conservation Trust, has been credited with turning around the park’s fortunes over the past decade, funding anti-poaching operations, road rehabilitation and infrastructure development that have made the park significantly more accessible to visitors than in years past.

What awaits travellers making the journey this season is a landscape defined by dramatic diversity. The park’s sandstone cliffs at Chilojo, rising in burnt-orange layers above the Runde River, rank among the most striking natural scenes in Zimbabwe, while its mix of riverine forest, mopane woodland, and open savanna supports an exceptional range of species, from large elephant herds and healthy predator populations to some of the country’s last remaining black rhino. Birdlife is equally rich, drawing keen birders into a park that rewards patience with sightings increasingly hard to find elsewhere.

As the summer rains begin transforming the lowveld’s dry-season browns into vivid green, the season traditionally brings a burst of new life to the park, newborn wildlife, migratory birds returning to the region, and dramatic afternoon skies that add further drama to the scenery, making it a particularly rewarding, if still wonderfully uncrowded, time to visit.

With the transfrontier park’s continued development and growing investment in tourism infrastructure, industry voices believe Gonarezhou’s days as Zimbabwe’s forgotten park are numbered. For now, though, that quiet remains part of its appeal, offering this summer season’s visitors an increasingly rare thing in African safari tourism: vast, wild space, largely to themselves.