Kafue National Park
Kafue National Park is one of Zambia’s oldest — and largest — national parks. It is best known for the diversity of its wildlife, with everything from elephants to crocodiles, pangolins to bushbabies living here.
The sheer size of the park means it isn’t a place to tick off the Big Five in 24 hours — instead, linger a while and explore some of Africa’s lesser-known animals.
At 22,400 square kilometres, Kafue itself represents 36% of Zambia’s national park land. When added to the surrounding 45,400 square kilometres of Game Management Area, the total protected zone constitutes a staggering 9% of the country’s entire landmass.
Kafue is named for the river, the lifeblood of the park, that dissects it, almost north to south, running for more than 250 kilometres
Hidden gems in Kafue National Park
Kafue National Park
Where to see everything in one place
Often overlooked in favour of Zambia’s smaller parks, Kafue is a sleeping giant. One of Africa’s oldest and largest parks and one of its wildest, it’s a place of vast, remote landscapes, spectacular rivers, open plains, woodlands and stunning scenery. If you want to avoid too much domestic flying, Kafue National Park has everything you could want. You can spend at least a week here travelling from camp to camp. This is the only park in Zambia where I have been lucky enough to see both aardvark and pangolin – two very rare safari sightings! The Busanga Plains to the far north of the park are one of Kafue’s highlights. Accessible only during the dry season, I love heading out onto the plains early in the morning, to see puku and red lechwe, in their hundreds, visible in the early morning mist that cloaks the plain just before sunrise. Equally special, but seldom visited are the Nanzhila Plains in the park’s south. This is a superb place for bird watchers. For me, the star of Nanzhila is the beautiful black-cheeked lovebirds, endemic to Zambia and only found in a small area in the southwest of the country. If you have the time and an accommodating safari operator, try to include both the far north and the far south of Kafue into your trip. While Kafue doesn’t have the huge herds of game that can be found in some other Zambia safari parks, what it lacks in density it more than makes up for in diversity. There are at least 161 species of mammal, six cat species, and 22 species of antelope.
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Where to see everything in one place
View experience
Kafue National Park tours
Zambia
Kafue National Park safari and Victoria Falls
Wildlife, waterfalls and wilderness
6 days $2,680 – $2,885 pp
Zambia
Zambezi Canoeing & Kafue National Park
Canoe, safari and boat cruise in Kafue National Park
10 days $2,991 – $3,227 pp
Zambia
Zambia's Animal Kingdom
13 days safari in Kafue National Park and South Luangwa National Park
13 days $7,300 – $7,720 pp
Kafue National Park
Kafue National Park Safari
Explore Kafue National Park and the Busanga Plains
10 days From $3,990 pp
Kafue National Park travel companies
Central America,
Africa,
Central Asia
YellowWood Adventures
Sustainable travel for the modern-day explorer
South America,
Africa,
Europe
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