Gonarezhou National Park is, along with Chizarira National Park, the most remote and least visited national park in Zimbabwe. It is part of a large transboundary conservation area that also includes Kruger National Park in South Africa and Limpopo National Park in Mozambique. With an area of 5,000 km², Gonarezhou ranks second only to Hwange National Park as one of the largest protected areas in the country. Its name comes from a Shona expression, gona rhe zhou, which means "a place with many elephants". The areas that make up the park today were for a long time the preferred territory of many pachyderms and became, as a result, a major hunting and poaching ground. In the 1920s, a certain Barnard (a bloodthirsty trophy hunter) even killed the famous Dhlulamithi, whose tusks are said to have weighed 110 kg and were the largest ever recorded in southern Africa. But elephants were not the only mammals affected by man's madness: for decades, the entire fauna was slaughtered, sometimes as a result of drought, sometimes as a result of tsetse fly eradication campaigns or intensive hunting. To stop this almost total extermination of the fauna, the Rhodesian authorities decided to transform the area into a reserve (in 1967), then into a national park (in 1975). But the civil war in Mozambique compromised this project. After fifteen years of relative peace, the fauna of Gonarezhou was once again decimated by the murderous bullets of Mozambican warriors, who had chosen these wild territories as a source of food. For more than ten years, the park was forced to close its access to the general public, before reopening its doors in 1994. Nowadays, few tourists venture here and the wildlife remains shy and secretive. However, the ambient tranquility and the extremely wild aspect of the place are really worth the detour... It is true that the protected area is getting better and better. In 2017, a collaboration agreement was signed between Zimparks and the Frankfurt Zoological Society, regarding the management and development of the park. In 2021, it led to the reintroduction of 29 black rhinos, while the species had been eradicated from the park by poachers, twenty-seven years earlier.

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Formations rocheuses du Gonarezhou National Park. Villiers Steyn - Shutterstock.com

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