Volcanoes

Founded in 1925 as part of the old Albert National Park of the Belgian Congo — the first national park in the whole of Africa — it became the separate Volcanoes National Park after Rwandan independence. It was here that the American primatologist Dian Fossey set up the Karisoke Research Centre in 1967, between the Karisimbi and Bisoke volcanoes, from where she documented mountain gorilla behaviour for almost two decades and fought an intense personal battle against poaching, until her unsolved murder in her own cabin in 1985; she is buried in the park's own cemetery, beside the graves of several of the gorillas she studied and named. Her work, told in the book and later film Gorillas in the Mist, was decisive in halting the species' decline, its world population having risen steadily ever since thanks to the conservation programmes she herself began.