Travel Guide Parc National De Minkébé

The Minkébé National Park, known as "the green lung of Gabon", in the extreme north-east of the country, has been totally uninhabited since the departure of the Fang at the beginning of the 20th century. This gives a particular prestige to this forest of nearly 8,000 km², populated by trees several hundred years old and cut by swampy clearings. The park has a particular characteristic of the Gabonese landscape: its rocks dominating the forest constitute the second largest intact forest block in the world. It contains trees of more than 50 m in height. The other major interest of this park: its large population of forest elephants, which has become a favorite target of poachers. Between 2004 and 2014, 25,000 elephants were killed by this chaotic poaching. The park has reportedly lost between 60% and 70% of its total elephant population. Fortunately, the government, through the ANPN, has reacted, undertaking a vast retaliation against illegal gold panners, attracted by the rising price of the precious metal (the park has an old gold mine that is no longer exploited) and suspected of facilitating poaching and the ivory trade. Regularly, the army intervenes in the park, the ecoguards being too few for this huge territory: this buffer zone attracts poachers from Congo and remains an important place of trafficking. The Minkébé Park is not accessible to tourism at present: apart from regular security problems, there are no accommodation facilities, even basic ones.