Mudumu

Mudumu National Park was created in 1990 in the Zambezi region, at the north-eastern tip of Namibia, and protects some 1,010 km² along the eastern bank of the Kwando River, next to the Botswanan border.

The landscape combines dry mopane and teak woodland, wooded savannah and the floodplains of the Kwando, with lagoons and oxbows that flood seasonally. That alternation between water and dry land is what supports its wildlife and what makes the park a corridor between the wetlands of the north and the more arid areas to the south.

Mudumu was at one point practically empty of wildlife: during the 1980s poaching and military activity decimated its populations, and the park was declared in 1990, with Namibian independence, precisely to reverse that situation. Its recovery has rested on the Namibian system of conservancies, community management areas around the park that give local people rights and benefits over wildlife, a model that has allowed elephants, hippos, sitatunga and predators to occupy the territory again. It is part of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area.