Taï National Park

Taï National Park covers roughly 5,000 square kilometres in southwestern Côte d'Ivoire, one of the last major blocks of primary tropical rainforest in West Africa. The park is contiguous with Liberia's Wonegizi Zone and together they form the largest remaining rainforest habitat in West Africa. The Cavalla River forms part of the western boundary, separating Côte d'Ivoire from Liberia.

The park was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982. The citation identified it as one of the most important forest reserves in Africa south of the Sahara on account of its biodiversity. The western lowland gorilla population here is one of the largest in Africa; the park is also a major refuge for forest elephants and chimpanzees. The chimpanzee communities in Taï have been studied continuously since the 1970s, providing some of the longest-running data on great ape behaviour in the wild.

Access to the interior requires advance registration with OIPR (the Ivorian Parks Authority) and the accompaniment of a licensed guide. This is not a park you walk into independently. The forest is dense to the point of being nearly opaque: visibility inside the canopy is measured in metres, not tens of metres. The upper canopy, where it exists, is invisible from the ground.

The experience of the forest is fundamentally one of water. Streams and rivers run through it, and the vegetation grows around them with a density that makes walking beside water the easiest form of movement. The sound of the forest is its own world: bird calls, insect sounds, the occasional percussion of something large moving in the canopy, and over it all the dense overlapping noise of primates making contact across the canopy.

The buttressed roots of old-growth trees, the lianas from canopy to floor, the epiphytes on every branch: the vegetation structure is complex in ways that are apparent without being fully legible. The trails, such as they are, cut through a forest that was never designed to be traversed. Each step on the soft floor pushes into decades of leaf litter, and the air is permanently humid, carrying the smell of active decomposition that is the forest working.

Taï is one of the last major refuges in West Africa for the western lowland gorilla, forest elephant and chimpanzee. The chimpanzee studies here, running since the 1970s, represent some of the longest continuous observations of great ape behaviour in the wild, and have produced insights into tool use, hunting cooperation and social structure that would be impossible to obtain elsewhere.

The forest is also extraordinary for its botanical complexity. Plant species density here is among the highest in Africa, and many plant groups reach their western limit of distribution within the park. Several species found here occur nowhere else in West Africa.

It is the largest remaining primary rainforest in West Africa and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, protecting one of the continent's most biodiverse ecosystems.

The western lowland gorilla population is one of the largest remaining in Africa, and the chimpanzee communities have been the subject of continuous study since the 1970s.

The experience of moving through old-growth tropical rainforest, with its density, sounds and humidity, is unlike anything available in the more visited savanna parks of East Africa.