Parque Nacional da Gorongosa Moçambique

Recognizing that the reserve needed more formal ecological protection and more facilities for its rapidly growing tourism business, in 1960 the government declared the reserve and another 2,100 square kilometers--a total of 5,300 square kilometers--a national park.

Many improvements to the new Park's trails, roads and buildings ensued. Between 1963 and 1965 Chitengo camp was expanded to accommodate 100 overnight guests. By the late 1960's, it had two swimming pools, a bar and banquet hall, a restaurant serving 300-400 meals a day, a post office, a petrol station, a first-aid clinic, and a shop selling local handicrafts. Revenue from hunting licenses and taxes on hunters elsewhere in Mozambique supported much of that development. At the same time, paving of the Beira-Rhodesia road and construction of the "drum bridge" over the Pungue River, in Bué Maria, helped to double the annual number of visitors.

The late 1960s also saw the first comprehensive scientific studies of the Park, led by Kenneth Tinley, a South African ecologist. In the first-ever aerial survey, Tinley and his team counted about 200 lions, 2,200 elephants, 14,000 buffaloes, 5,500 wildebeest, 3,000 zebras, 3,500 waterbucks, 2,000 impala, 3,500 hippos, and herds of eland, sable and hartebeest numbering more than five hundred.

Tinley also discovered that many people and most of the wildlife living in and around the park depended on one river, the Vunduzi, which originated on the slopes of nearby Mount Gorongosa. Because the mountain was outside the Park's boundaries, Tinley proposed expanding them to include it as a key element in a "Greater Gorongosa Ecosystem" of about 8,200 square kilometers.

He and other scientists and conservationists had been disappointed in 1966 when the government reduced the Park's area to 3,770 square kilometers. The official reason for the reduction was that local farmers needed more land. Tinley saw the situation differently. Pointing out that wildlife had been eradicated from many nearby areas, he suggested that the real purpose of the reduction was to make more wildlife available to local hunters. "Their hunger is for protein, not land" he said.

Meanwhile, Mozambique was in the midst of a war for independence launched in 1964 by the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo). Fortunately the war had little impact on Gorongosa National Park until 1972, when a Portuguese company and members of the Provincial Volunteer Organization were stationed there to protect it. Even then, not much damage occurred, although some soldiers hunted illegally.  In 1976, a year after Mozambique won its independence from Portugal, aerial surveys of the Park and adjacent Zambezi River delta counted 6,000 elephants and about 500 lions, probably the largest lion population in all of Africa.

In a clear tribute to the Park's growing worldwide reputation and importance to wildlife conservation in Mozambique,  the Frelimo government selected Gorongosa in 1981 to host the country's first National Conference on Wildlife.

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