Tsavo

Declared in 1948 and split administratively into Tsavo East and Tsavo West, it is the largest national park in Kenya. Part of its worldwide fame rests on an episode in 1898, when two maneless male lions killed dozens of the Indian and African workers building a railway bridge over the Tsavo River, terrorising the camp for months until they were shot by the engineer Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson; the story, which Patterson told himself in The Man-eaters of Tsavo, later inspired several Hollywood films. Its elephants are easily recognised by the reddish cast of their skin, stained by the iron-oxide dust of the local volcanic soil, which they roll in to keep off the sun and the parasites.