Garden Route

Garden Route National Park was created in 2009 by merging three previously protected areas — Tsitsikamma National Park, Wilderness National Park and the Knysna forest areas — along with the land between them, forming a unit of some 1,210 km² along the southern coast of the Western and Eastern Cape.

It brings together three main settings. The indigenous Knysna forest is South Africa's largest remnant of Afromontane forest, with large stinkwood (estinkhout) and yellowwood trees, intensively worked for timber from the nineteenth century and today recovering; it is home to the Cape parrot, endemic and severely threatened, and until recently was the last stronghold of the Knysna elephants, now reduced to a handful of animals or possibly extinct. The Wilderness area protects a system of coastal lagoons, vleis and estuaries of great value for waterbirds. And Tsitsikamma comprises a strip of rocky coast and cliffs where the forest reaches the sea.

Tsitsikamma was also the first marine park declared in Africa, in 1964, and its strip of sea functioned for decades as a no-take fishing reserve, which made it a scientific reference on the recovery of fish populations; the partial opening to recreational fishing in 2016 generated strong controversy. Dolphins are seen in its waters and, in season, southern right whales, and the Otter Trail, one of the best-known coastal paths on the continent, runs through the park.