Africa > Liberia > Sapo National Park
Sapo is Liberia's only national park and the largest contiguous block of primary lowland rainforest in West Africa — roughly 1,800 km² of dense forest in the country's southeastern interior, in Sinoe County. It is one of the last intact pieces of the Upper Guinean Forest hotspot, a once-vast ecosystem that today survives only in fragments stretching from Guinea through Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire and into western Ghana.
The roll call of wildlife in Sapo reads like a checklist of what survives of Upper Guinean West Africa: forest elephants, pygmy hippopotamus (one of the most reliable populations anywhere of this very rare species), chimpanzees, leopards, several species of duiker, the western African manatee in the rivers, Diana monkeys, red colobus, and a long list of forest birds including hornbills, the white-breasted guineafowl and the rufous fishing-owl. Over 125 mammals have been recorded in the park, along with more than 590 species of birds.
The park is wild and barely set up for tourism. Access is from Greenville and the small town of Juarzon on the park's edge — both expeditions in themselves from Monrovia. A permit and a guide must be arranged in advance through the Forestry Development Authority (FDA) and the Society for the Conservation of Nature in Liberia (SCNL). There are no lodges; visitors camp at basic stations and trek into the forest with rangers. The trekking is hard, hot and wet, and wildlife is mostly heard rather than seen — but the forest itself is reason enough to come.
Sapo also has a difficult recent history: illegal mining and large-scale unsanctioned settlements during and after the civil wars threatened large parts of the park, and rangers were periodically evicted by gold miners. The miners were finally cleared out in 2013 after a sustained government effort, and the FDA has been progressively rebuilding ranger infrastructure since. For now, the park is the country's best remaining wild place — and one of the most important conservation sites in West Africa.