Tsavo East National Park

Kenya’s Largest Wilderness

Tsavo East covers roughly 13,747 square kilometres of open plain, semi-arid scrub and river country between Nairobi and the coast, making it the largest national park in Kenya. Gazetted in 1948 as part of Tsavo National Park and later separated from Tsavo West by the Nairobi–Mombasa highway, it remains one of the least crowded of the country’s major parks — long stretches of the drive pass without another vehicle in sight.

The park takes its name and much of its character from the Tsavo and Galana rivers, whose green corridors draw elephant, buffalo, hippo and crocodile through the dry months. Tsavo’s elephants are its signature: they dust-bathe in the region’s red laterite soil until their hides glow terracotta, which is how the famous “red elephants” got their name.

Away from the rivers the Yatta Plateau runs the length of the park’s western boundary — a lava flow some 290 kilometres long and among the longest on earth. Tsavo also carries one of Kenya’s best-known stories: the man-eating lions that halted construction of the Uganda Railway at the Tsavo River in 1898, and whose descendants still roam the same country.