Lake Turkana National Parks

The Lake Turkana National Parks were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1997 and comprise three protected areas in northern Kenya: Sibiloi National Park, with 157,085 hectares, and those of Central Island, with 500, and South Island, with 3,900. The extension to include South Island came in 2001.

Turkana is the largest desert lake on the planet, the fourth in Africa by volume and the most saline of its great lakes. It occupies the floor of two tectonic troughs at the northern end of the Kenyan Rift, in an arid territory battered by drought. It measures some 249 kilometres long by an average of thirty wide, and has three volcanic islands; Central Island is a small active volcano with three saline lakes in its craters.

It is an exceptional laboratory for the study of plant and animal communities. The parks are a staging post for migratory waterbirds and the principal breeding ground of the Nile crocodile and the hippopotamus, as well as holding more than three hundred and fifty species of fish and birds and a notable diversity of venomous snakes. The Koobi Fora deposits, in Sibiloi, rich in mammal remains, molluscs and other fossils, have contributed more to the understanding of palaeoenvironments than any other site on the continent.