W National Park

W National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

The W National Park lies at the meeting point of three countries of West Africa, Niger, Benin and Burkina Faso, and takes its curious name from the shape of the river Niger, which on the park's northern edge doubles back on itself in a series of sharp bends, forming a letter W on the map. It is one of the largest protected areas in the region and, with the adjoining parks of Arly and Pendjari, the last great refuge of the wildlife of the West African savanna. It must be said at once, however, that the park is not at present a place that can be visited. Since about 2018 armed jihadist groups have operated throughout the border zone between the three countries, using the park's forests as a refuge and a corridor;

rangers, soldiers and civilians have been killed in attacks, tourists were kidnapped and their guide murdered in the neighbouring Pendjari in 2019, French aid workers and their Nigerien companions were killed in a giraffe reserve near Niamey in 2020, the governments of the three countries have closed all or most of the park to visitors, and every foreign government advises against all travel to the area. This entry is therefore a description of what the park is, and of how it was visited until a few years ago, and is not an invitation. In those days it was approached from three sides. From Niamey, the capital of Niger, a drive of two and a half hours led to the entrance at La Tapoa, where a simple hotel stood beside the river, and from which tracks ran to the pools and to the gorges of the Tapoa and the Mekrou; from Benin, the park was entered from the towns of Kandi and Banikoara, by the Alfakoara elephant pool and the waterfalls of Koudou; and from Burkina Faso, from the town of Diapaga. A four-wheel-drive vehicle, a guide, and the dry season were essential.

Visiting W National Park: what you will see

The park originated in a hunting reserve created by the French colonial administration in 1926, was declared a national park in 1954, separately in each of the three territories, and covers about 10,000 square kilometres, of which rather more than half lies in Benin, a quarter in Burkina Faso and 2,200 square kilometres in Niger. The Nigerien part was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1996, and in 2017 the inscription was extended to the whole W-Arly-Pendjari complex, some thirty thousand square kilometres in the three countries, the largest and most important continuum of savanna ecosystems in West Africa. The landscape is a gently undulating plateau of ancient rock at about 250 metres, covered with Sudanian wooded savanna and shrub savanna, with gallery forests along the rivers, stretches of bare lateritic crust, and scattered baobabs, cut by the seasonal rivers Tapoa, Mekrou and Alibori, which the dry season reduces to chains of pools, and bounded on the north-east by the Niger, where the river's double bend is caused by its meeting the hard quartzites of the Atakora range. The Mekrou has cut through these rocks a gorge with cliffs and the falls of Koudou. The park lies in a zone of transition between the dry Sahel and the more humid savannas to the south, and it shelters species of both.

It holds, with its neighbours, the largest population of elephants left in West Africa, several thousand in the complex, the greater part of the region's few hundred surviving lions, a critically endangered western lineage, the last cheetahs of West Africa, of the north-west African race, of which only a few dozen remain anywhere, leopards, spotted and striped hyenas, the African wild dog, now very rare, buffalo, hippos, roan antelope, hartebeest, the korrigum or western topi, kob, waterbuck, reedbuck, oribi, red-fronted gazelle, warthogs, baboons and patas monkeys, and the manatee in the Niger. Some 350 species of birds have been recorded, the wetlands along the river being an important wintering ground for ducks, storks and waders from Europe. The park also has a human interest: its territory has been inhabited since the Stone Age, the remains of old villages, iron-smelting furnaces and graves are scattered through it, and the way in which centuries of settlement, abandonment and burning shaped the present vegetation was one of the grounds for its World Heritage listing. Its principal difficulties, before the present insecurity, were poaching, the illegal grazing of cattle by herders moving south in the dry season, in hundreds of thousands of head, the cutting of trees for fodder, and the spread of cotton growing up to its borders in Benin, with the pesticides that accompany it. Since 2020 the organisation African Parks has managed the Beninese part, under an agreement with the government, in conditions of great danger, and the Beninese army is deployed within it.

W National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

When it was open, the park could be visited only in the dry season, from about December to the end of May, the tracks being impassable during the rains, from June to October, when the park was closed. The best period for seeing animals ran from February to April, when the grass had been burned and the water was confined to the permanent pools and the rivers, where the wildlife gathered; December and January were cooler, 20 to 32 degrees, with the dusty haze of the harmattan, and April and May extremely hot, above 40 degrees.

The region is malarial, a yellow fever certificate is required by all three countries, and meningitis occurs in the dry season. None of this is of practical use at present, and no one should attempt to travel to the park or to the border districts round it. The giraffes of Koure, the last herd of the West African giraffe, which lived in farmland an hour from Niamey, were formerly the accessible wildlife sight of Niger, and they too are now in an area to which travel is advised against.