Akagera National Park

Akagera National Park is Rwanda's only savannah park and Central Africa's largest protected wetland. Established in 1934, it is home to the Big Five: lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos, and buffalo, which roam wild across four distinct ecosystems covering 1,122 square kilometres along Rwanda's eastern border with Tanzania. A birder's paradise, the park holds over 520 species including the rare and much sought-after shoebill stork.

The park is open daily, 6am to 6pm. Entrance fees are $100 per adult (international).

Akagera is one of the few places in Africa where you can see the Big Five in a single day. The southern gate is 2.5 hours from Kigali by road. Most people who visit don't have a week to spend on safari. They have a day, maybe two. Akagera is perfect for that.

If you're comparing Akagera to Serengeti or Kruger, I'll save you the trouble. Akagera will never have Serengeti's wildebeest migration or Kruger's elephant herds. It's a smaller park. Most parks give you abundance of a few species. Akagera gives you all of them and more.

Open savannah in the north where lions hunt in the open and prey stays close for the same reason: they can see the lions coming. Dense acacia woodland to the west where leopards hunt under cover and hoist their kills into the trees to keep them from hyenas.

Papyrus swamp along the eastern boundary, four metres high. Home to the shoebill stork, one of the rarest birds on earth, unchanged since the prehistoric age. It stands so still you will think it is dead until it moves.

And ten lakes in the south, where Lake Ihema holds one of the highest concentrations of hippos in East Africa, shared with crocodiles, elephants, and the fish eagle whose call carries across the water before you ever see it. 

On a full-day safari you have an 80 to 90% chance of seeing four of the Big Five, depending on the season. The leopard is different. It's nocturnal, solitary, and its spotted coat makes it almost invisible. It's most often sighted in the southern woodlands. But we won't pretend otherwise. Spotting a leopard in Akagera boils down to luck.

The dry season from June through September is peak season: visibility is at its clearest and animals concentrate around water. But the short dry season from mid-December through mid-February matches it for sightings, with a quieter park and lower lodge rates.

If you want the best combination of wildlife and space, January is the answer. If the Big Five is the priority, visit in the dry season. October and November bring the strongest birding of the year as migratory species arrive from the north, mornings stay clear, and you'll have the park largely to yourself.

Inside the park, accommodation ranges from Wilderness Magashi Luxury Camp, Akagera Game Lodge and Ruzizi Tented Lodge at the mid-to-upper range, to basic campsites for budget travellers. 

None of this was guaranteed.

I've been running safaris in Akagera National Park since 2006. What changed in that time is hard to overstate. When we started, the park had under 5,000 animals and no lions, no rhinos.

After the genocide ended in 1994, Rwandans who had lived as refugees for 35 years finally came home. They needed land, they needed to feed their families, and some moved into Akagera. It was a lack of options. But the park paid for it.

Lions killed cattle, and the owners poisoned the lions in response. There had once been more than 300. The last was seen in 2001. Rhinos had been poached for three decades before that: by 2007 the last one was gone.

What you're visiting now is a park that rebuilt itself from almost nothing. Seven lions were flown in from South Africa in 2015. Eighteen rhinos followed in 2017. In June 2025, 70 southern white rhinos arrived, the largest single rhino translocation ever recorded. The park that had fewer than 5,000 animals when we started now holds over 13,000.

Every animal in this park is here because a country that had just lost a million of its people, on land it could not afford to spare, surrounded by communities who had every reason to take it, chose to give it back to the wild.

Akagera's story is Rwanda's story, told through its wildlife. It is a story of resilience that defies logic.

-Richard Rwabutogo, Founder, Akagera Safari. Running safaris in Akagera since 2006.

See what a real day at Akagera looks like — Akagera National Park Photos: 1 Day Safari, Hour by Hour