Recently proclaimed national park is already a magnificent mix of beach and bush attractions, close to South Africa
It’s a sad fact that throughout my childhood, Mozambique was off-limits to tourists because it was being torn apart by civil war. Although I grew up in Durban, just a few hours south of the border, it was a total no-go zone. No one ever mentioned its beauty, its wild lands, nor the incredible strips of unspoiled coast where you can walk for hours without seeing another soul. All we ever heard were horror stories.
Skip forward three decades, and Mozambique has been named (by Condé Nast Traveler) among the top places in Africa to visit in 2024. It’s little wonder. Among the country’s emerging destinations is Maputo National Park, which, despite being less than an hour south of the capital, must rank among the most healing and restorative places on Earth.
A conservation triumph, thanks in large part to the efforts of Peace Parks Foundation that manages it, the national park was officially proclaimed in December 2021, the result of a merger between Maputo Special Reserve and Ponta do Ouro Partial Marine Reserve into one contiguous area. It stretches for around 100km, from just south of the capital to Mozambique’s southern border, where it reaches the northern boundary of Tembe Elephant Park in KwaZulu-Natal’s Maputaland.
Within the 1,700km2 reserve, there exists a thriving mix of swamp forests, sprawling wetlands, coastal lakes and endangered mangroves, huge grasslands and beautiful beaches. From as few as 100 elephants that survived the war, the park’s pachyderm population is now flourishing, with estimates as high as 600 or 700. Herds can be found on the open floodplains or ambling through dense dune forests.
It’s not only the expanses of shimmering green that make the reserve special, but that it incorporates a huge protected marine area, shelter for whales, dugongs and sharks – plus its beaches are vital nesting sites for endangered leatherbacks and loggerheads. From October through February, it’s possible to see female turtles making their way across the sand to lay their eggs or witness hatchlings crawling towards the water at night.
Take Your Time
It’s also a place that brings you down to Earth completely. Despite the good road network and proximity to Maputo’s airport, once you enter, you become aware of the huge distances and are slowed down as much by the soft-sand tracks as by the lush wildness. It can feel as though you’ve travelled back in time.
From the main gate, it took us more than an hour to reach our freshly minted chalets at Ponta Membene, an accommodation project realised by Peace Parks in an effort to create a place for adventurous travellers from all walks of life – and somewhere that could appeal to a mix of budgets.
It’s an architect-designed mix of self-catering chalets for families, more compact units deep within a sunlight-dappled dune forest, and – at the other end – slick camping sites. Built with low-impact materials and designed to blend into the environment, it’s a tucked-into-the-bush hideaway in the true sense.
From my ‘dune’ chalet, where the waves sounded like they were inches from the bottom of my bed, I had only to open the windows for a full-blown sensation of sleeping in a forest.
Instead of TVs and internet scrolling, our evenings were given over to al fresco dinners served on one of the communal decks, a stone’s throw from the sea. We grilled prawns skewered on sticks over the fire and later huddled around the flickering flames and listened to one of the reserve’s ecologists talking about the great efforts to restore the park’s habitats to what they once were.
Helping pave a path to recovery in the wake of the war that lasted from 1975 until 1992, around 5,000 animals have been translocated into the area since 2010. Almost a dozen species, including cheetahs, have been reintroduced. Infrastructure and security personnel have been installed, and the park is now a lynchpin in the vast Lubombo Transfrontier Conservation and Resource Area, a network of protected places straddling northern KwaZulu-Natal, Mozambique, and eSwatini, covering some 10,029 km².
Balance Being Restored
According to Peace Parks’s Georgie Pearce, the reserve is seeing rising populations of predators – including hyena, serval, genet, jackal, and various raptors. “Carnivores are stepping into their role of fine-tuning the food web by controlling prey numbers and better balancing the greater ecosystem,” she says.
Most exciting are recent signs of leopard activity caught on the park’s network of camera traps. “Historically, the ecosystem has lacked the balance and biodiversity that leopards bring,” says Pearce. “But it’s now able to sustain them.” The leopards that are settling in have been tempted from far away by the park’s resurgent health and vitality, “a fantastic sign of nature bouncing back if given the chance,” she says.
Best of all, Pearce believes, is that leopard cub tracks have been found, signalling that these apex predator numbers are “growing naturally” and “becoming self-sustaining.”
The park is also renowned for its birdlife, so on our first morning, we bundled the birders into the 4×4 to see what we could see. We passed in and out of alternating biomes. One moment the vehicle was hemmed in by thick bush, waterberry and monkey orange trees, and ‘jungley’ tangles of sprawling vines on all sides, and the next we were moving across a vast marshland – swampy, reed-covered, and lined with wild date and ilala palms.
Squawks, tweets, whoops, and ca-caws came from all sides – the sort of soundtrack capable of converting anyone to the birdwatching game. The twitchers, clutching their bird-call apps, binoculars, and Roberts field guides, were caught off-guard by the variety and abundance of feathered creatures they were able to identify. For those with less extreme bird-watching tendencies, there were the easy-to-spot trumpeter hornbills with their oversized beaks balancing on branches overhead and the slightly crazed calls of purple-crested turacos.
When we stopped at a tranquil, reed-encrusted lake, a black-headed heron flew above the water’s surface; higher up, soaring on the thermals, a fish eagle uttered its familiar cry. Across the way were submerged hippos and crocs sprawled like logs on the distant shore, where rows of low hills undulated towards the horizon. There were nyala, waterbuck, and oribi, a side-striped jackal bounding through the tall grass, and an elephant, all alone, splashing about at the lake’s edges.
Around each bend there was more of that rare feeling of being somewhere untouched and seldom seen. Throughout that entire morning drive, there were no other vehicles.
Back at the lodge, a quick stroll ended on the beach, a magnificent, unspoiled coastline that stretched endlessly in both directions. For the rest of the morning, there were long walks, rock-pool snorkeling sessions, and e-bike rides along the shore all the way to Anvil Bay, with a slight breeze whipping the hair in our faces as ghost crabs by the thousands scuttled towards the water. A sense of unmitigated freedom came over me – the kind of feeling you have when the rest of the world and all its troubles are too far beyond your reach to care.
Text and photography | Keith Bain
For more information, go to parquemaputo.gov.mz
