Nyanga

Nyanga National Park was established in 1926 in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe, next to the Mozambican border, and protects some 472 km². It is the country's oldest national park, and its origin lies in the land Cecil Rhodes acquired in the area in the late nineteenth century and bequeathed to the state.

The landscape is middle mountain: high-altitude grassland, granite outcrops, valleys with gallery forest and plantations of introduced conifers. Its summit, Mount Nyangani, reaches 2,592 metres and is the highest point in Zimbabwe, and the park contains the Mtarazi Falls, one of the highest waterfalls in Africa.

The cool, damp climate contrasts with the rest of the country and has made the district a summer destination since colonial times. The park also preserves notable archaeological heritage: the so-called Nyanga terraces and stone enclosures, an extensive farming system built between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries with retaining walls, channels and circular structures that extend over thousands of hectares, evidence of an intensive mountain agriculture whose interpretation is still the subject of research.