Ngorongoro Conservation Area

Ngorongoro is not a national park — it is a multiple-use conservation area run by the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority (NCAA), where wildlife, tourism and Maasai pastoralism share the same 8,292 square kilometres. It was set aside in 1959 and made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979, gaining rare mixed natural-and-cultural status in 2010.

Its centrepiece is the Ngorongoro Crater: a collapsed caldera roughly 600 metres deep with a 260-square-kilometre floor, formed two to three million years ago. Around 25,000 large animals live inside it, including one of the best chances in East Africa of seeing black rhino, plus a dense lion population, elephant, buffalo, hippo and flamingo on the soda lake. The wider conservation area also contains Olduvai Gorge, one of the most important early-human fossil sites in the world, where Homo habilis remains were found. A crater descent is usually combined with the Serengeti and Tarangire on a northern-circuit itinerary.