Ngorongoro Conservation Area
Highland plains, forest and volcanic craters between the Serengeti and the Great Rift Valley. Wildlife shares the land with Maasai herders and their livestock. It holds the Ngorongoro Crater, Olduvai Gorge and the short-grass plains where the wildebeest calve.
- Best time
- All year. The crater holds wildlife in every season, and the migrating herds are on the Ndutu plains from about late December to April.
The conservation area was set up in 1959 as a multiple land use area, where wildlife lives alongside semi-nomadic Maasai pastoralists. It runs from the Serengeti plains in the north-west to the eastern arm of the Great Rift Valley, and UNESCO lists it as a World Heritage Site.
Most visits centre on the Ngorongoro Crater, the largest unbroken caldera in the world, where wildlife lives all year, black rhino included. The Olmoti and Empakaai craters lie in the same volcanic highlands.
In the west, Olduvai Gorge and the footprints at Laetoli have given some of the most important evidence of human evolution. From about late December to April the migrating herds graze the plains around Ndutu, on the Serengeti boundary, and calve there.
Wildlife
- Black rhino
- Lion
- Elephant
- Buffalo
- Wildebeest
- Zebra