Arusha National Park

Arusha National Park: Forest, Lakes and a Volcano on the City's Doorstep

Arusha National Park is small by Tanzanian standards, but it packs more landscapes into 552 km² than many parks ten times its size. It was set up in 1960 as Ngurdoto Crater National Park and renamed in 1967, when the slopes of Mount Meru were added. Today it climbs from open grassland and lakes at about 1,500 m (4,921 ft) to the 4,566 m (14,980 ft) summit of Meru, Tanzania's second highest mountain.
The park has three main areas. Ngurdoto Crater, about 3 km across and 300 m deep, is wrapped in rainforest and left to the wildlife: you look down on buffalo and warthog from lookouts on the rim. The Momella Lakes, a chain of shallow alkaline lakes, change colour with their minerals and draw flamingos and other water birds. Above them, the forests and slopes of Mount Meru lead up to its broken crater.

Wildlife here is different from the big-cat parks further west. Giraffe, buffalo, zebra, waterbuck, warthog and hippo are easy to see, black-and-white colobus monkeys leap through the forest canopy, and more than 400 bird species have been recorded. Lions are very rarely seen and leopard keep to the forest, so this is a park for scenery, walking and gentler wildlife rather than predators.
Because it sits so close to town, Arusha National Park works well on the first or last day of a trip, before heading to Tarangire, the Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti. It is also a good warm-up before climbing Kilimanjaro, whose snowy summit you can see from the park on clear mornings. For other parks to combine, browse all our Tanzania destinations.