Montañas Mahale

Mahale Mountains National Park was established in 1985 in western Tanzania, on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, and protects some 1,613 km². It is one of the most remote parks in the country: no roads reach it, and access is by light aircraft and then by boat across the lake.

The range rises abruptly from the shore to more than two thousand metres, and that vertical range produces a succession of environments running from the riverine forest and the lake beach to montane forest and, on the summits, high-altitude grassland. The park also sits at a biogeographical crossroads between the West African rainforests and the eastern savannahs, which explains its diversity.

Its best-known value is primatological: it holds a chimpanzee population of several hundred individuals, the subject of continuous research since 1965 by the team of the Japanese primatologist Toshisada Nishida, one of the longest field studies of chimpanzees in the world alongside Jane Goodall's at Gombe, somewhat further north. That monitoring has made it possible to document cultural traditions particular to each group. The waters of Tanganyika, off the park, hold an extraordinary diversity of endemic cichlids, the result of evolutionary radiation in one of the oldest and deepest lakes on the planet.