Volcanoes National Park

The Virunga Massif rises from the earth in western Rwanda like a line of ancient sentinels, eight volcanoes crowded into a strip of land barely fifty kilometres wide where Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo meet. From a distance the mountains look serene, draped in the greens of cultivated fields and, higher up, the dark cloak of montane forest. Up close, the scale is disorienting — the volcanoes are enormous, their slopes steep, their craters breached and slumped in ways that speak of violence both volcanic and human. Volcanoes National Park covers 160 square kilometres of this landscape and is the most visited national park in Rwanda, drawing people from every corner of the world for a single reason: the mountain gorilla.

The trek to find a gorilla family begins in the pre-dawn darkness of Kinigi, the park headquarters, where rangers brief trekkers and assign families. What follows is a hike through farmland, then bamboo forest, then montane forest, the terrain changing as elevation increases until you are moving through a landscape that feels genuinely wild. The hour spent with a gorilla family — watching silverbacks rest, infants play, mothers forage — is tightly regulated by the park: one hour with the gorillas is permitted, no more, and groups are kept to eight people or fewer. The permit costs eight hundred and fifty dollars per person per trek, and the revenue funds the entire conservation programme that has pulled the mountain gorilla back from the edge of extinction. The species remains endangered, with roughly one thousand individuals remaining across Rwanda, Uganda and DRC, but populations have slowly increased over the past decade.

The Rwandan primatologist Dian Fossey lived and worked in these mountains through the 1960s and 1970s, documenting the gorillas' lives with a rigour that had never been applied to any wild great ape population before. Her book Gorillas in the Mist brought international attention to the Virunga gorillas and to the very real threats they faced from poaching, habitat loss and political instability. Fossey was murdered near her cabin at Karisoke in 1985; her killers were never definitively identified, though the Rwandan government at the time was widely suspected. Her tomb and that of her favourite gorilla, Digit, stand on the slopes of Mount Visoke, a short hike from the main trailhead, and remain a place of pilgrimage for researchers and visitors alike.

The park is also home to the golden monkey, another endangered species found only in this corner of the Albertine Rift, and guided day hikes to the twin craters of Bisoke and the saddle between Karisimbi and Visoke offer alternatives to the gorilla trek for those who cannot obtain the increasingly scarce and expensive permits. The Bisoke crater lake, sitting in a perfect bowl at the summit, is one of the most striking natural sights in all of Rwanda, and the hike to the top, though strenuous, is considered one of the finest mountain walks in East Africa.

The mountain gorilla trek: spending one hour with a habituated gorilla family in the Virunga mountains is one of the most profound wildlife encounters on Earth.

Dian Fossey's Karisoke research station and grave are accessible by guided hike, offering a window into the history of gorilla conservation.

The dramatic volcanic landscape — steep slopes, mist-shrouded craters, and views across the Albertine Rift — is spectacular even without the wildlife.