Qualla: Mavinga National Park

Mavinga National Park: Introduction

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Some roads in Mavinga National Park cannot be driven. Not because they have washed out, and not because the bush has reclaimed them, but because they are mined. Three decades of civil war left unexploded ordnance scattered across southeastern Angola, and when the government proclaimed Mavinga a national park in 2011, landmine removal was listed alongside fire management and anti-poaching as a top priority. It is a strange kind of park where the management plan reads like a postwar reconstruction brief -- and yet that is precisely what makes Mavinga remarkable. Covering 46,076 square kilometres of Cuando Province, the park forms the western anchor of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, Africa's largest conservation landscape, spanning parts of five countries.

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Mavinga National Park: A Landscape Shaped by Fire and War

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Before the Angolan Civil War erupted in 1975, the province of Kuando Kubango supported more than 150 mammal species. Elephants, buffalo, roan antelope, and eland moved through a mosaic of miombo woodland, open grassland, and river-fed wetlands between the Longa and Cuito rivers. ...

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Mavinga National Park: Building a Park from Scratch

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Mavinga and its contiguous neighbor, Luengue-Luiana National Park, were proclaimed together in 2011 and are managed as a single unit. The combined area is immense -- together they exceed the size of some European countries. But proclamation on paper and function on the ground are...

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Mavinga National Park: The Kavango-Zambezi Vision

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. What gives Mavinga significance beyond its own borders is the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, known as KAZA. Encompassing contiguous portions of five nations -- Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe -- KAZA is the largest transboundary conservation init...

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Mavinga National Park: The Slow Return

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Recovery in Mavinga is not dramatic -- it is incremental and fragile. Wildlife surveys since 2011 have documented the slow return of species to areas where they had been hunted out. The five identified habitat types -- open woodland, dense woodland, open grassland, aquatic vegeta...

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