Simien

Declared in 1969 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1978 — one of the first twelve natural sites ever inscribed on the list — it protects a landscape of precipices up to 1,500 metres high, cut by millions of years of erosion into an ancient volcanic plateau and nicknamed the roof of Africa for its peaks, among them Ras Dashen, the highest in Ethiopia. It is the only place in the world where the walia ibex lives, an endemic wild goat that came to the brink of extinction in the 1960s with fewer than 200 animals left and has since recovered moderately under the park's protection, and it likewise shelters the Ethiopian wolf, the most threatened wild canid on the planet, confined entirely to the Ethiopian highlands. Its slopes also hold troops of geladas, endemic ground-dwelling primates nicknamed bleeding-heart baboons for the red patch on their chest, which live almost entirely on grass — unusual behaviour in a primate.