Simien Mountains National Park
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Interesting facts
- Geladas are the only primates that live almost entirely on grass, which can make up about 90 percent of their diet.
- Male geladas carry a bright red, hourglass-shaped patch of bare skin on the chest, which earned them the nickname "bleeding-heart monkey".
- Geladas graze the plateau by day but spend the night sleeping on narrow ledges of the sheer escarpment cliffs.
- The walia ibex came close to vanishing: in the mid-1990s only about 200 to 250 survived, but by 2004 the count had roughly doubled to around 500.
- A male walia ibex can weigh up to about 125 kilograms and carry backward-curving horns up to about 110 centimetres long.
- The park's first game warden, from 1967 to 1969, was the Welsh-born naturalist C. W. Nicol, who mapped its boundaries before Haile Selassie proclaimed it.
- Nicol later settled in Japan and described his two years in the mountains in the book From the Roof of Africa, published in 1971.
- The core park covers roughly 412 square kilometres, and its vegetation belts span more than 2,500 metres of altitude.
Why it is worth it
Simien Mountains National Park protects the highest part of the Simien massif in northern Ethiopia, one of the most dramatic landscapes in Africa. The massif is the remnant of a huge shield volcano built of flood basalts around 30 million years ago; erosion has since carved it into jagged pinnacles, deep valleys and escarpments dropping up to 1,500 metres in sheer cliffs. The park includes Ras Dashen, Ethiopia's highest summit. Founded in 1969, it was among the first sites in the world inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage list, in 1978, for its biodiversity and scenery.
Vegetation climbs in bands with the altitude: montane forest of juniper, African redwood (Hagenia) and wild olive; then an ericaceous belt of giant heath hung with lichen; and above 3,700 metres, Afroalpine moorland dotted with the tall rosettes and flower spikes of giant lobelia. An unpaved road crosses the park eastward from Debark through villages to the Buahit Pass at about 4,430 metres, then turns south to Mekane Berhan.
The park's wildlife is what sets it apart. The walia ibex, a wild goat found nowhere else on earth, lives on the cliffs, and the park is its only home. Gelada baboons, the Ethiopian wolf and Menelik's bushbuck, all endemic to the Ethiopian Highlands, share the park with leopards, caracals and klipspringers, and a 2015 survey found rodents and shrews recorded nowhere but in these mountains. Among the birds, the lammergeier, or bearded vulture, with a wingspan of up to three metres, sails along the cliffs. The park was placed on the list of World Heritage in Danger in 1996 because of declining populations of walia ibex and other species, and was removed in 2017 after they recovered.
People have farmed the highlands around the mountains for at least 2,000 years, and villages remain within and around the park. Trekking routes follow the escarpment edge, with views down into the lowlands far below.
Getting there
Park headquarters are in Debark, a town on the main road north of Gondar, about 18 km from the park. Gondar, about 95–100 km south of Debark, has the nearest airport (GDQ), with domestic flights; from there it is about an hour and a half by road to Debark.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Simien Mountains National Park is the largest national park in Ethiopia. Located in the North Gondar Zone of the Amhara Region, its territory covers the highest parts of the Simien Mountains and includes Ras Dashan, the highest point in Ethiopia.
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