Akagera lies along Rwanda’s eastern boundary and is quite unlike the rest of the country: rolling acacia savanna in the west, and a chain of lakes and papyrus swamps fed by the Akagera River in the east. It is Rwanda’s only savanna park.
The park lost much of its wildlife in the years after 1994, when a large share of its area was resettled. Management passed to a joint Rwanda Development Board and African Parks partnership in 2010, and the recovery since has been substantial: lion were reintroduced in 2015 after a fifteen-year absence, and eastern black rhino followed in 2017.
Akagera now supports all of the Big Five, along with substantial hippo and crocodile populations in the lakes, and it pairs naturally with gorilla trekking in the north-west to make a complete Rwandan itinerary.