Ngorongoro Conservation Area — protected area
James Wagner · CC BY-SA 4.0

Ngorongoro Conservation Area

  • 2 min read
  • 3.210° S 35.460° E
  • UNESCO World Heritage
  • UNESCO natural beauty

Interesting facts

  • Before it collapsed, the Ngorongoro volcano may have stood between 4,500 and 5,800 metres high, rivalling Kilimanjaro.
  • Laetoli, inside the conservation area, preserves a trail of about 70 footprints left by upright-walking hominins some 3.6 million years ago.
  • Two German brothers, Adolph and Friedrich Siedentopf, leased land and farmed on the crater floor until the outbreak of the First World War.
  • No European is known to have entered the crater before 1892, when the Austrian explorer Oscar Baumann reached it.
  • In 1962 a plague of blood-sucking stable flies left the crater's lions covered in infected sores, and their numbers crashed from 75–100 to just 12.
  • Between January and April 2001 about a third of the crater's lions died from a combination of tick-borne disease and canine distemper.
  • Lake Magadi on the crater floor is often dotted with thousands of flamingos, mostly lesser flamingos that feed in its alkaline water.
  • Long before the Maasai, the Iraqw arrived in the area about 2,000 years ago, and the Datooga joined them around 1700.
  • The Maasai population of the conservation area grew from about 8,700 in 1966 to more than 93,000 by 2017.
  • The Ngorongoro volcano was active roughly 2.45 to 2 million years ago, and its smaller neighbours Olmoti and Empakaai collapsed in a similar way.

Why it is worth it

Ngorongoro Crater is the centrepiece of this protected area in northern Tanzania. It is a volcanic caldera about 610 metres deep with a floor of roughly 260 square kilometres, formed two to three million years ago when a large volcano collapsed on itself. It is often described as the world's largest intact, unflooded caldera. The crater floor lies at about 1,800 metres. Streams from the forested rim feed a seasonal soda lake, Makat or Magadi, along with the Lerai fever-tree forest and the swamp around Ngoitokitok Spring. The Maasai name is said to imitate the sound of a cowbell.

About 25,000 large animals live on the crater floor, mostly grazers: buffalo, wildebeest, zebra, eland and gazelles. Lions live here at one of the highest densities known. The crater's black rhino population fell from over a hundred in the 1960s to 13 in 1993, and protection programmes had brought it back to about 55 by 2018. Some familiar savannah species are missing, including giraffe, impala and topi. The crater acts as a natural enclosure, and its lions are notably inbred because few outside males manage to join the population.

The conservation area covers about 8,300 square kilometres, far more than the crater itself. It includes the Olmoti and Empakaai craters and the southern Serengeti plains, which the great wildebeest and zebra migration crosses from December. It also takes in Olduvai Gorge, where Mary and Louis Leakey's excavations from the 1950s uncovered early members of the human lineage. Unusually for an East African park, it was set up in 1959 as a multi-use area where Maasai herders could keep living alongside wildlife. It was listed by UNESCO in 1979 for its natural values and in 2010 also for its cultural ones. Grazing on the crater floor has since been banned. From 2021 the government began moving Maasai residents to Msomera, several hundred kilometres away, and human-rights groups have criticised the move as coercive.

Getting there

The main gateway town is Karatu, about 27 km from the protected area. The regional hub is Arusha, around 180 km to the east. The closest scheduled airport is Arusha Airport (ARK), about 130 km away. Most visitors come by road from Arusha on an organised safari. Access is managed by the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority, which charges separate entry, vehicle and crater fees.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Tanzania 6The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Nature Sanctuaries 43The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Gardens, Parks and Forests 61The UNESCO Sites of Exceptional Natural Beauty 77The Most Beautiful Nature Sanctuaries 91The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests 232The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

Ngorongoro Conservation Area is a protected area and a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Ngorongoro District, 180 km (110 mi) west of Arusha City in Arusha Region, within the Crater Highlands geological area of northeastern Tanzania. The area is named after Ngorongoro Crater, a large volcanic caldera within the area. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority (NCAA), which administers the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA), is an arm of the Tanzanian government and its boundaries follow the boundary of the Ngorongoro District in the Arusha Region. The western portion of the park abuts the Serengeti National Park (SNP). The area comprising the NCA, SNP, and Kenya's Maasai Mara game reserve is home to Great Migration, a massive annual migration of millions of wildebeest, zebras, gazelles, and other animals. The NCA also contains Olduvai Gorge, one of the most important paleoanthropological sites in the world.

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