Valle de Kidepo

Kidepo Valley National Park was established in 1962 at the north-eastern tip of Uganda, in the Karamoja region, next to the borders with South Sudan and Kenya, and protects some 1,442 km². It is the country's most remote and least visited park.

The landscape is semi-arid savannah between two river valleys, the Kidepo and the Narus, both seasonal, ringed by mountains rising above 2,700 metres. During the long dry season the Narus keeps a few permanent pools that concentrate all the park's wildlife, while the Kidepo valley becomes a bed of sand.

Its isolation and its climate give it a fauna found in no other Ugandan park: Somali ostrich, caracal, bat-eared fox, lesser kudu and beisa oryx live here, species of Somali-Masai affinity absent from the rest of the country, along with lions, cheetahs, elephants and buffalo in large herds. The region is the territory of the Karamojong people, semi-nomadic herders, and of the Ik, a very small community that lives in the mountains on the park's edge and that was displaced from its territory when the park was created.