Primate Safaris
Contact us
T : +256 392 159 498
T : +9 1 9544 666 665
E : info@primatesafaris.com
Primate Safaris
Contact us
T : +256 392 159 498
T : +9 1 9544 666 665
E : info@primatesafaris.com
National Park
Salonga National Park.
About the Park
The largest block of intact lowland tropical rainforest in the Congo Basin and accessible only by water or air, Salonga National Park stretches across 36,000 square kilometers in the heart of the Democratic Republic of Congo, making it the largest tropical rainforest reserve in all of Africa, and one of the most important ecosystems on earth. A UNESCO World Heritage Site. A carbon sink of global significance. A place so vast and so intact that it remains, in large parts, scientifically unexplored.
What lives here exists on a different register from almost anywhere else in Africa. Salonga protects approximately 15,000 bonobos, possibly 40% of the entire world population, making it the largest expanse of legally protected bonobo habitat on earth. The bonobo — our closest great ape relative alongside the chimpanzee, matriarchal, peaceful, and found only in the Congo Basin moves through these forests in ways science is still working to fully understand. To encounter one in Salonga is not just a wildlife sighting. It is a meeting with something irreplaceable.
The Congo peafowl, a bird so rare it remained undiscovered by science until the 20th century, lives here. Forest elephants move through the undergrowth. Golden cats hunt the shadows. Sitatunga antelopes wade through the swamp forest. Pangolins, ancient and armored, forage through the leaf litter of a forest that has never been logged, never been farmed, never been anything other than exactly what it is.
Salonga does not offer itself easily. It rewards the committed traveler who understands that the most extraordinary places on earth are not always the most comfortable to reach, and that the reward for getting here is something that cannot be found anywhere else on the planet.
Wildlife
- Leopard
- Elephant
- Cape Buffalo
- Hornbill
- Colobus Monkey
- Mongoose
- Pangolin
- Bongo
- Galago (bushbaby)
- Kingfisher
- Weaver Bird