Qualla: Lavushi Manda National Park

Lavushi Manda National Park: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2016 the ecotourists who visited Lavushi Manda National Park spent, between all of them combined, 330 dollars. The park occupies 1,500 square kilometers of mountains, miombo woodlands, and seasonal wetlands in Zambia's Muchinga Province. Thirty-two bed-nights were booked that year: a three-percent occupancy rate. These numbers are not metaphors. They are the actual scale on which a mid-sized African national park operates when its large mammals have been poached out and the last wild black rhinoceros in Zambia was seen here sometime in the late 1980s and never seen again.

Lavushi Manda National Park: The Mountain and the Plateau

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lavushi Manda sits on a plateau between the Muchinga Escarpment to the east and the alluvial flats of the Bangweulu floodplain to the northwest. The eleventh largest of Zambia's twenty national parks, it was gazetted as a Game Reserve in 1941 and promoted to National Park in 1972...

Lavushi Manda National Park: A Park Counted in Beetles

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When you cannot point to rhinos or lions, you point to what you have. A 2015 herping trip recorded the skink Mochlus sundevallii at Fibishi Camp and the flap-necked chameleon Chamaeleo dilepis in the canopy. Possibly unique forms of Trachylepis varia and T. striata were collected...

Lavushi Manda National Park: The Long Work of Recovery

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For years the Kasanka Trust, the non-profit that runs neighbouring Kasanka National Park, also managed Lavushi Manda under a memorandum with Zambia's Department of National Parks and Wildlife. About a third of the Trust's budget went here. World Bank funding built administrative ...

Lavushi Manda National Park: Fire as a Tool

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Rangers here manage the woodland with matches. Early in the dry season they set deliberate fires, controlled burns that consume the underbrush while the weather is still cool enough to keep the flames low. This prevents poachers from setting more destructive late-season fires in ...