Queen Elizabeth National Park

Queen Elizabeth National Park is Uganda’s most popular savannah reserve and has the widest variety of wildlife of any Ugandan park. The variety of habitats includes grassland savannah, forests, wetlands and lakes. This provides the setting for an extensive range of large mammals and primates. Four of the Big Five are present (rhino are absent) and chimp tracking is available.

Wildlife in Queen Elizabeth National Park

This is the most reliable park in Uganda for lion, which is particularly common on the grassy Kasenyi Plains, but is more famous for its tree-climbing antics in the Ishasha sector. Huge herds of buffalo and elephant are found in the savannah areas of the park, and an amazing number of hippos inhabit the Kazinga Channel on which daily boat trips are conducted.

Despite the diversity of its wildlife – ranging from hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Ugandan kob in the northern Kasenyi Plains, to chimps at Kyambura Gorge in the east, tree-climbing lions at Ishasha in the south and over 600 species of birds in between – Queen Elizabeth National Park is quiet and quite serene. True, the wildlife may not be as copious as some Kenyan or Tanzanian parks, but the Big Five are all here aside from rhinos. 

Scenery

The park is set against a backdrop of the Rwenzori Mountains. Additional scenic points are Kazinga Channel between Lake Edward and Lake George and at least 10 crater lakes. The most accessible part of the park is open savannah, but large forest areas are open to the public. These include the forested Kyambura Gorge and the extensive Maramagambo forest in the southeast.