Arusha

Arusha National Park was established in 1960 in northern Tanzania, next to the city of the same name, and protects some 552 km². Despite its modest size, it brings together three very different settings.

The first is the Ngurdoto Crater, a volcanic caldera with wooded walls whose floor is a marshy grassland where buffalo and warthog graze and into which descent is not permitted, so that it is watched from the viewpoints on the rim. The second is the Momella lakes, a group of shallow alkaline pools of different colours according to their composition and the algae they contain, with concentrations of flamingos and waterbirds. And the third is Mount Meru, a stratovolcano of 4,566 metres, the second highest mountain in Tanzania, whose crater was opened sideways in an eruption and left a spectacular horseshoe with a cinder cone inside it.

The park is one of the few in Tanzania where walking with an armed guide is allowed, and it holds a notable population of black-and-white colobus in the high-altitude forests, along with Masai giraffe, zebra and antelope. There are no lions, which makes that kind of visit possible. From its slopes there is a view over Kilimanjaro, some seventy kilometres to the east.