Gorongosa

Over 4,000 square kilometres of the Great Rift floor and the plateau around it, and the best argument anywhere that a wrecked place can be brought back. Through the Mozambican civil war from 1977 to 1992 both sides shot the elephants for ivory to pay for the fighting, and the large mammals were cut by as much as 95 percent. An aerial survey in 1994 counted, across 68 square kilometres, five elephants, six waterbuck and three zebra. Leopard, African wild dog and spotted hyena were gone from the park entirely; the lions hung on in tiny numbers. Since 2004 the Carr Foundation and the government have been rebuilding it, and the carnivores are being put back one species at a time: wild dogs in 2018 and 2019, leopards from 2020, spotted hyenas from 2022. The aerial counts now show sharp rises in the big animals. Mount Gorongosa, 1,863 metres, was added in 2010 because its rivers are what fill Lake Urema and therefore the whole system.