Serengeti National Park

Its name comes from the Maasai word siringet, meaning the land that stretches on for ever. It was first protected as a game reserve in 1921 after a telling episode: an American hunter and his companion camped near Seronera and shot more than 50 lions in little over a month, alarming the British colonial authorities into seeing that real protection was needed. It became a national park in 1951, though the colonial administration then restricted access for the Maasai themselves, whose traditional grazing land was divided in 1959 between the park and the neighbouring Ngorongoro Conservation Area. It is the setting of the Great Migration, the largest movement of land mammals on the planet, in which over 1.5 million wildebeest, along with hundreds of thousands of zebra and gazelle, follow an annual circuit of more than 1,000 km between Tanzania and Kenya's Maasai Mara in search of fresh grazing.