Nairobi

Nairobi National Park was created in 1946 and was Kenya's first national park. It protects some 117 km² of savannah immediately south of the centre of the capital, barely seven kilometres from the financial district, which makes it a unique case: it is the only national park in the world within the limits of a major capital city.

The landscape is open grassland with acacias, wooded valleys and a permanent river, and that combination supports a surprisingly complete fauna: lion, leopard, cheetah, buffalo, Masai giraffe, eland, zebra and a birdlife of more than four hundred species. Only the elephant is missing, incompatible with an area of this size. The park also holds an important black rhino population and has served as a reservoir for restocking other areas of Kenya.

Its southern boundary is open to allow the seasonal migration of herbivores towards the Kitengela and Athi plains, and that corridor is today the park's great problem: the growth of Nairobi, housing developments, fencing and the building of infrastructure such as the standard gauge railway have been strangling it. The park is also the site of the monument where Kenya publicly burned tonnes of confiscated ivory, in 1989 and in 2016, as a gesture against trafficking.