# Tarangire National Park > Baobab country, and the largest elephant concentrations in the north. Canonical: https://seeyoutanzania.com/parks/tarangire Edited by: Kabeer Dalvi (https://seeyoutanzania.com/about) ## At a glance - **Managed by:** TANAPA - **Area:** 2,850 km² - **Established:** 1970 - **Region:** Manyara Region - **Best time:** July–October ## The park Tarangire is shaped entirely by one river. In the dry months it is the only permanent water for a great distance, and the animals of a much larger ecosystem — the Maasai Steppe, stretching well beyond the park boundary — come to it. The result, between roughly July and October, is one of the densest concentrations of elephant anywhere in East Africa. The landscape is unlike the Serengeti's: rolling, wooded, and full of **baobabs**, many of them centuries old and scarred by elephants working at the fibrous trunks for moisture. Termite mounds stand everywhere, many colonised by dwarf mongoose. Come in the wet season and the park is a different, quieter place. The herds disperse across the steppe, the grass is high and green, and the birding — TANAPA records more than 550 species — is at its best. It is also nearly empty of vehicles. ## Wildlife - Elephant - Lion - Leopard - Buffalo - Fringe-eared oryx - Gerenuk - Kudu ## What to do ### The Tarangire River Dry-season lifeline. Sit still near it in the late afternoon and the park comes to you. ### Ancient baobabs Centuries old, and bearing elephant tusk marks. ### Night game drives Offered by the park — leopard, civet and genet after dark. ### Silale swamp In the south, holding water and buffalo when everywhere else has dried. ## Getting there About two hours by road from Arusha — the closest of the northern circuit's big parks. ## Everything follows the river Tarangire is the rare park that can be explained in one sentence: it is the place the water does not leave. The Tarangire river rises in the south and runs the length of the park before turning west towards Lake Burunge, and through the dry months it is the only permanent surface water across a very large stretch of the Maasai Steppe. Everything else in that landscape either walks to it or does without. What you see in the dry season is therefore not a park full of animals so much as a **region emptying into a valley**. By September the river is mostly sand with pools strung along it, and the herds that arrive to drink have often walked a long way to get there. The park's own slogan for itself is *the elephant paradise*, and between July and October the description is hard to argue with. The river is fed from the other end. The southern and eastern swamps — **Silale**, **Gursi**, **Larmakau** and **Nguselorobi** — take up water through the rains and release it slowly, which is what keeps the river running when nothing else does. Silale is the one most visitors see: a green plain in the middle of brown country, with elephant out on it in numbers, and it is generally the last part of the park to dry. The land itself is granite ridges and open valley, with four habitats braided together — acacia woodland, *Combretum* woodland, seasonally flooded grassland and the **baobabs** the park is known for. Termite mounds stand everywhere; the abandoned ones are occupied by dwarf mongoose, and TANAPA also lists pangolin among the tenants. ## The park is the small part of it Tarangire's 2,850 square kilometres are roughly a seventh of the system they belong to. The **Tarangire ecosystem is about 20,500 square kilometres**: the park is the dry-season concentration area, and the wet-season dispersal and calving grounds lie outside it, north on the Northern Plains and east on the **Simanjiro Plains**. When the rains come the animals leave, because the grass out there carries the nutrients a lactating female needs and the park's does not. This is why the same park can feel crowded in September and nearly empty in March, and it is also the park's central conservation problem. The dispersal areas are unprotected land under cultivation, and the routes between them and the park have been closing for fifty years. A count on the Simanjiro plains in April 1972 found roughly **6,000 zebra and 10,000 wildebeest**; the migration has contracted substantially since, and the standard explanation in the literature is the conversion of the wet-season range to farmland rather than anything happening inside the park. Some of that ground is now held by community conservation rather than by the state. **Randilen WMA** runs along the park's northern boundary, and **Burunge WMA** sits between Tarangire and [Lake Manyara](https://seeyoutanzania.com/parks/lake-manyara) on the Kwakuchinja corridor — the strip of country elephant and buffalo use to move between the two parks. These are Wildlife Management Areas, village land set aside by the villages themselves and earning from tourism, and they are the reason the corridor still functions at all. It matters for a visit in one practical way. What you can see inside a national park and what you can do on WMA land are different: the WMAs permit night drives and walking, which TANAPA restricts inside the park, and they are usually cheaper to sleep on. ## The elephants, and a thirty-year count Tarangire holds the largest elephant population in northern Tanzania, and it is also one of the best-studied anywhere. The **Tarangire Elephant Project** has run since **1993**, when Charles Foley began following individually known animals to see what heavy poaching had done to elephant society — the population had been cut hard through the 1980s, before the international ivory ban of 1989. The recovery it recorded is unusually well documented, and worth quoting precisely because it is so often quoted loosely. Foley and Faust, publishing in *Oryx* in 2010, followed **27 known family groups** in the northern part of the park from 1993 to 2005. That monitored group grew **from 226 animals to 498**, an average of **7.1 per cent a year** — close to the biological maximum for the species. Mean family size roughly doubled, from 8.4 to 18.3. Those are figures for a studied subset, not for the park: a 2000 estimate put the whole park's elephants at about **2,385**, and more recent counts are higher. Any single number you are quoted for “the elephants of Tarangire” is a snapshot of a population that moves in and out of the boundary with the season, so treat it as an order of magnitude. What the long study changed is what guides can tell you. Because the families are known individually, the elephants here are not an anonymous herd — they have histories, and the behaviour you watch at the river in the late afternoon is behaviour somebody has been writing down for thirty years. ## Dry country, and the birds that come with it The Maasai Steppe is arid, and Tarangire is consequently the northern circuit park for animals that belong to dry country rather than to the plains. **Fringe-eared oryx**, **gerenuk** and **lesser kudu** are all here and are all difficult to find elsewhere on the circuit; so are large herds of buffalo, waterbuck along the river, and giraffe in the *Combretum*. Lion, leopard and cheetah are all resident, and Tarangire has been designated a Lion Conservation Unit since 2005. African wild dog occur but are genuinely rare. The birding is the park's quiet claim to being more interesting than its neighbours. TANAPA records **more than 550 species**, and three of them are the draw: the **yellow-collared lovebird**, the **ashy starling** and the **rufous-tailed weaver** are all restricted, or nearly so, to the dry savannah of north-central Tanzania. You can see them on a game drive without trying, and you cannot easily see them anywhere else in the world. The best birding is in the wet season, which is the opposite of the best game viewing — the migrants are in, the swamps are full, and the park is close to empty of vehicles. If you are coming for birds, come in the months everyone else avoids. One long-running curiosity: a white giraffe, pale through leucism rather than albinism, was documented in the park in 2015 and followed for some years afterwards. Ask; the guides know the story. ## Getting in, and what it costs Tarangire is the easiest of the big northern parks to reach: about **two hours from Arusha** on tarmac, with the **main gate** at the northern end a short run off the Arusha–Dodoma road. Lake Manyara is roughly seventy kilometres further on, which is why the two are almost always sold together. There are secondary gates on the west and east sides for people coming from Babati, Mbulu or the south; they are quieter and they are also further from the lodges. **A new western entrance opened on 23 April 2026.** TANAPA's **Mamire gate**, reached through Babati District, is intended to open the park to visitors arriving from central Tanzania — the route it makes practical is the standard gauge railway from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma and then road, without going round by Arusha at all. It is new enough that most itineraries have not caught up with it. **Fees** are set by the government, charged for each 24 hours, and lower than the Serengeti's. TANAPA's published schedule for 2023/24 — the most recent it has issued — puts Tarangire, [Lake Manyara](https://seeyoutanzania.com/parks/lake-manyara) and [Arusha](https://seeyoutanzania.com/parks/arusha) in the same band: **USD 50 for a non-East African adult in peak season, USD 45 in low**, with USD 15 for children aged 5 to 15. **All of it is exclusive of 18 per cent VAT**, so what you actually pay is USD 59.00 and USD 53.10. That is the whole reason operators look as though they disagree. One publishes 50, another 59, and it is the same official fee with and without VAT. Ask which a quote means. **Low season is narrower than it sounds:** TANAPA charges the low rate only between **15 March and 15 May**. The rest of the year, including the quiet green months, is peak. The park is **cashless**, like the rest of TANAPA's estate: fees are paid by card or mobile money against a government control number rather than in cash at the gate. **What you can do here** is wider than on most of the circuit, and it is official rather than marketing: TANAPA offers **night game drives** — the way to see civet, genet and, with luck, leopard — as well as **guided walking safaris** and **sunrise balloon flights**. Night drives and walks both have to be booked; they are not something to turn up and ask for. *The two Tarangires. Which one you get depends entirely on the month.* | Months | The park | What it is good for | | --- | --- | --- | | June–October | Dry. Herds concentrated on the river and the swamps | Game viewing at its best, elephants in numbers, most vehicles and highest prices | | November–December | Short rains. Herds beginning to disperse | Green, quieter, still good on the river | | January–February | Hot and mostly dry between the rains | A reasonable compromise — fewer people, game still findable | | March–May | Long rains. Animals dispersed east to Simanjiro | Birding at its peak, swamps full, few vehicles, lowest prices, some tracks difficult | Note: Fees are from TANAPA's own 2023/24 tariff schedule, the most recent published, and are quoted exclusive of 18 per cent VAT. They may have risen since; confirm before budgeting. ## How long, and where to sleep Most itineraries give Tarangire a single night, or a day trip on the way to Ngorongoro, and that is the standard mistake. The park rewards sitting still — a full day spent working the river and the swamp edges is worth more than two mornings of driving through. **Two nights** is the number that changes the visit. Inside the park there are public campsites booked through TANAPA, unserviced special campsites, and a handful of lodges and tented camps, most of them in the north within reach of the main gate. The southern swamps are a long way in and are served by very few camps, which is exactly why people who have been before go there. Outside the boundary, the WMAs and the private land around Kwakuchinja are often better value, and they allow the night drives and guided walks that are restricted inside. The cost is the drive to the gate each morning and the park fee each time you re-enter. Tarangire also combines unusually well. [Lake Manyara](https://seeyoutanzania.com/parks/lake-manyara) is an hour on, [Ngorongoro](https://seeyoutanzania.com/parks/ngorongoro) half a day, and [Arusha](https://seeyoutanzania.com/guides/arusha) close enough that Tarangire works as the first stop of a northern circuit rather than an afterthought at the end of one. ## Common questions ### When is the best time to visit Tarangire? June to October, and especially August to October. The park is dry then, the river is the only water for a long way, and the herds concentrate on it. March to May is wet: the animals disperse east to the Simanjiro plains, but the birding is at its best and the park is nearly empty. ### How many days do you need in Tarangire? Two nights. One night is the common booking and it is not enough — the park rewards a full day spent on the river and the swamp edges rather than a morning drive on the way somewhere else. ### How far is Tarangire from Arusha? About two hours by road on tarmac, which makes it the closest of the northern circuit's big parks. Lake Manyara is roughly seventy kilometres beyond it, and the two are usually visited together. ### How much does it cost to enter Tarangire? TANAPA's published 2023/24 schedule sets Tarangire at USD 50 per non-East African adult per 24 hours in peak season and USD 45 in low, exclusive of 18 per cent VAT — so USD 59.00 and USD 53.10 in practice. Low season runs only from 15 March to 15 May. Operators quoting 50 and quoting 59 are describing the same fee with and without VAT. Payment is cashless. ### Are there really that many elephants in Tarangire? Yes, in the dry season. Tarangire holds the largest elephant population in northern Tanzania, and because the park is the only permanent water across a much larger area, the animals of that whole area concentrate here between about July and October. In the wet season many of them leave. ### Can you do night drives and walking safaris in Tarangire? Yes. Tarangire is one of the few national parks where TANAPA offers night game drives, along with guided walking safaris and sunrise balloon flights. All of them have to be booked in advance rather than arranged at the gate. ### Is Tarangire worth visiting if you are already going to the Serengeti? Yes, and for a different reason than the Serengeti. It is dry country rather than plains, so it holds animals the Serengeti does not — fringe-eared oryx, gerenuk, lesser kudu — along with baobabs, the heaviest elephant concentrations in the north, and three birds found almost nowhere else. It is also on the way. ## Checked against - [Tarangire National Park — official page](https://www.tanzaniaparks.go.tz/nationalparks/Tarangire), TANAPA - [Tanzania National Parks Tariffs 2023/2024 — schedule to GN No. 490A of 2020](https://www.tanzaniaparks.go.tz/uploads/publications/en-1688147569-TARIFFS%20Design%20202324.pdf), TANAPA - [Rapid population growth in an elephant Loxodonta africana population recovering from poaching in Tarangire National Park, Tanzania](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/oryx/article/rapid-population-growth-in-an-elephant-loxodonta-africana-population-recovering-from-poaching-in-tarangire-national-park-tanzania/2DADFFCB562E9553B1DF7688EB372FBF), Foley & Faust, Oryx 44(2), 2010 - [The migration of zebra and wildebeest between Tarangire National Park and Simanjiro Plains, northern Tanzania, in 1972 and recent trends](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2028.1997.071-89071.x), Kahurananga & Silkiluwasha, African Journal of Ecology, 1997 - [Tanzania opens new Mamire Gate to expand access to Tarangire National Park](https://atta.travel/resource/tanzania-opens-new-mamire-gate-to-expand-access-to-tarangire-national-park.html), African Travel and Tourism Association - [Tarangire Ecosystem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarangire_Ecosystem), Wikipedia - [Tarangire National Park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarangire_National_Park), Wikipedia ## Related - [Manyara region guide](https://seeyoutanzania.com/guides/manyara) - [All the parks](https://seeyoutanzania.com/parks)