Selous Game Reserve

 

As fifty-five thousand square kilometres, Selous is the largest protected area in Africa or anywhere in the world. It is part of an even broader ecosystem, which extends into the Reserva do Niassa across the Mozambique border.

The Selous Game Reserve is larger than Switzerland and has no human settlements, so it is a wild universe of great beauty and variety. Only the northern area, crossed by the Rufiji River, is open to tourism.

The Selous is home to the largest number of animals compared to any other protected area in Tanzania: sixty thousand elephants, forty thousand hippopotamuses, three thousand five hundred lions, one thousand three hundred African wild dogs (now the rarest predators in existence), five thousand sable antelope, one hundred and thirty thousand buffalo, and about four hundred and fifty species of birds.

Selous is prevalently flat and characterized by higher temperatures than the parks on the northern circuit, with very different habitats like miombo forests, clearings dotted with baobab trees, ebony, acacias, stony hills with low grass, plains that flood during the rainy season, swamps and lakes amid the meanders of the Rufiji. Here tourists are fewer than in the busier Northern Parks and most of the structures are concentrated along the river.

In the Selous Game Reserve, in addition to game drives, we also offer walking safaris and motor boat safaris along the Rufiji River.

Since it is quite close to the coast and the islands, the Selous Game Reserve is easy to combine with a beach extension.

We recommend Selous from June to December as March and April are very wet.