About the park
Lower Zambezi National Park: Zambia's great river park
4,092 square kilometres on the north bank of the Zambezi, gazetted in 1983 out of a presidential game reserve, with a 1,200 metre escarpment behind it and Zimbabwe's Mana Pools directly across the water.
A park defined by one river
Lower Zambezi National Park covers 4,092 square kilometres along roughly 120 kilometres of the Zambezi River in south-eastern Zambia. It sits inside a far larger conservation landscape of about 20,000 square kilometres, the Lower Zambezi Area Management Unit, which adds the Chiawa, Luano and Rufunsa game management areas to the park itself. Those two numbers get conflated constantly, and the park is not 4,124 square kilometres, a figure that appears online but traces to nothing credible.
The park was gazetted in 1983. Before that it was the private game reserve of Zambia's first president, Kenneth Kaunda, and the Kenneth Kaunda Ruins inside the park are the remains of his retreat. A second date gets mixed up with that one: 1994 is when Conservation Lower Zambezi was founded, not when the park was created.
Management sits with DNPW, Zambia's Department of National Parks and Wildlife, under the Ministry of Tourism. African Parks has three Zambian mandates, at Liuwa Plain, Bangweulu and Kafue, and this is not one of them.
Three zones, and the one that matters to visitors
The rule that explains this park in a sentence: most of its area is escarpment miombo, and almost all of its game viewing happens on a narrow strip of alluvial valley floor beside the water. With little water on the escarpment, the dry season pushes the game down onto the flat plain beside the deep, permanent river.
The escarpment forms the northern boundary and acts as a natural barrier. It holds the marginal species, sable, roan, samango monkey and Verreaux's eagle among them, and very few visitors ever set foot on it.
| Zone | What grows there | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Riverbank | Ebony, leadwood, figs, Trichilia emetica and sausage tree | Where every camp sits and where the boats and canoes work |
| Floodplain and alluvial terrace | Winterthorn parkland fringed by mopane, plus palm savanna | The game-viewing ground: dry-season concentrations happen here |
| Escarpment | Thick broadleaf miombo woodland, rising to about 1,200 m | Most of the park's area, almost none of its tourism, largely unsurveyed |
Not a World Heritage Site, and the reason that confusion exists
This one is worth getting right. The World Heritage Site on this stretch of river is Mana Pools National Park with the Sapi and Chewore Safari Areas, inscribed in 1984, 6,766 square kilometres in total, under criteria seven, nine and ten. That is across the river, in Zimbabwe, and it is a different country and a different park. Lower Zambezi is not a World Heritage Site.
What is true is that at the time of the Mana Pools inscription the World Heritage Committee asked Zambia to consider nominating Lower Zambezi so the two could eventually form a joint transboundary inscription. A first joint technical meeting was held in Chirundu on 23 and 24 November 2017, and the Committee has since encouraged both states to finalise the memorandum establishing the Lower Zambezi and Mana Pools transfrontier conservation area. Lower Zambezi appears on Zambia's UNESCO tentative list; the submission date we found should be verified by hand before anyone quotes it.
One more geographical correction while we are here: this park is not in KAZA. The Kavango-Zambezi transfrontier area covers western Zambia, Angola, Botswana, Namibia and western Zimbabwe, and its elephant figures do not apply here. The transfrontier area this park belongs to is Lower Zambezi and Mana Pools.
Conservation Lower Zambezi
Founded in 1994, Conservation Lower Zambezi works with DNPW across the park and the surrounding game management areas through four programmes: natural resource protection, community empowerment, environmental education and applied research. It employs 43 community scouts alongside local Community Resource Boards, the first unit established in 2013, and runs aerial patrols in a Cessna 172 registered 9J-CLZ.
The aerial numbers are the ones worth knowing. In 2016 that aircraft detected 52 per cent of all poached elephant carcasses found in the area that year. In 2024 the aerial team located 22 per cent of poached elephants discovered, supported 63 poacher arrests, supplied 258 ration packs, spotted eight drying racks and five poacher camps from the air, and flew over 100 hours.
The organisation has grown from 12 staff in 2011 to 58 in 2018, and from roughly $500,000 of expenditure in 2014 to $1,735,434 in 2024 against income of $2,028,315. Zambia's first all-female community scout unit, Kufadza, was formed here in 2021, and a marine unit base opened at the Chongwe confluence in 2022 along with the new Chavululu Gate on the eastern boundary. The base camp runs on a 10 kVA solar system that saves around $10,000 a year in fuel.
The valley has had setbacks too. An anthrax outbreak in 2012 killed over 40 elephants, after which all lions in the park were inoculated against it. In 2014 elephant poaching in the park was the lowest on record.
The Kangaluwi copper mine: both common versions are wrong
You will read that the mine was approved and is going ahead, or that it was cancelled. Neither is accurate. The honest position is that the mine is not operating and has been repeatedly halted, but the record shows repeated reversals and the licence has never been definitively and finally extinguished. The proposed footprint is about 12 square kilometres, between two seasonal rivers that discharge straight into the Zambezi.
Nothing has been published since March 2025, so the status is unresolved.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2011 | A 25-year licence granted to Mwembeshi Resources for an open-cast copper mine inside the park |
| 2012 | ZEMA, the environmental regulator, rejects the impact statement: the site is not suitable, located in the middle of a national park |
| 2014 | Ministerial approval on appeal, overriding the regulator |
| 2018 and 2019 | The High Court dismisses the conservationists' challenge on a legal technicality |
| January 2020 | The Tourism Minister states the mine will not proceed because the environmental impact report has expired |
| February 2021 | The Court of Appeal of Zambia dismisses the final appeal |
| May 2022 | ZEMA and government signal a go-ahead, causing major public outcry |
| August 2023 | ZEMA cancels its permission for non-compliance with the conditions of its May 2021 decision letter |
| April 2024 | Government cancels the mining licences of over 2,500 companies, including Mwembeshi |
| March 2025 | The Minister of Green Economy orders Mwembeshi to halt all activity on the $494m project for violating environmental conditions |
Status as of mid-2026 could not be verified beyond March 2025. If you are researching this seriously, check for news later than that date.
The neighbours
Directly opposite, on the southern bank, lies Mana Pools National Park in Zimbabwe, 2,196 square kilometres of floodplain that most people have heard of before they hear of this park. The two face each other across the water and share the same elephant.
The practical difference for a visitor is simple: night drives are offered on the Zambian side and not on the Zimbabwean one. That single rule is the clearest reason to choose this bank.