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Hunting reserve: 1920–1959[edit]
The first official act to protect the Gorongosa region, Portuguese Mozambique, came in 1920 when the Mozambique Company ordered 1,000 square km set aside as a hunting reserve for company administrators and their guests. Chartered by the government of Portugal, the Mozambique Company controlled all of central Mozambique between 1891 and 1940.
In 1935, Mr. Jose Henriques Coimbra was named warden and Jose Ferreira became the reserve's first guide. That same year the Mozambique Company enlarged the reserve to 3,200 square km to protect habitat for nyala and black rhino, both highly prized hunting trophies. By 1940 the reserve had become so popular that a new headquarters and tourist camp was built on the floodplain near the Mussicadzi River. It was abandoned two years later due to heavy flooding in the rainy season. Lions then occupied the abandoned building and it became a popular tourist attraction for many years, known as Casa dos Leões (Lion House).
National park: 1960–1980[edit]
Waterbucks
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 1960s, 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.
The late 1960s also saw the first comprehensive scientific studies of the park, led by Armando Rosinha, Director of Gorongosa, and Kenneth Tinley, an Australian ecologist. In the first-ever aerial survey, Tinley and his team counted about 200 lions, 2,200 elephants, 14,000 African buffalo, 5,500 wildebeest, 3,000 zebras, 3,500 waterbuck, 2,000 impala, 3,500 hippos, and herds of eland, sable antelope and hartebeest numbering more than 500.
Tinley also discovered that many people and most of the wildlife living in and around the park depended on one river, the Vundudzi, which originated on the slopes of the 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 were disappointed in 1966 when the government reduced the park's area to 3,770 square kilometers.
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 1974, the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon overthrew the Estado Novo regime. When the new Portuguese authorities decided to abdicate power in their overseas territories, Mozambique became an independent republic. In 1976, a year after Mozambique won its independence from Portugal, aerial surveys of the park and adjacent Zambezi River delta counted thousands of elephants in the region and a healthy population of lions, numbering in the hundreds. It was the largest lion population recorded in the greater Gorongosa region to date.
Civil war: 1981–1994[edit]
Grey crowned cranes
In 1977, the People's Republic of Mozambique, under the leadership of Samora Machel declared itself a Marxist-Leninist state. A rebel army known as RENAMO sprung up to oppose the new government. Feeling threatened by FRELIMO's new one-party government in Mozambique, neighbouring Rhodesia and South Africa began arming and supplying RENAMO. Once Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980, direct support for RENAMO came from South Africa with the intention of destabilizing Machel's government. Initially dismissed by Machel as a group of "armed bandits", RENAMO's war developed into a full-scale national threat by 1981. In December 1981 the Mozambican National Resistance (MNR, or RENAMO) fighters attacked the Chitengo campsite and kidnapped several staff members, including two foreign scientists. The Mozambican Civil War lasted from 1977 to 1992.
The violence increased in and around the park after that. In 1983 the park was shut down and abandoned. For the next nine years Gorongosa was the scene of frequent battles between opposing forces. Fierce hand-to-hand fighting and aerial bombing destroyed buildings and roads. The park's large mammals suffered huge losses. Both sides in the conflict slaughtered hundreds of elephants for their ivory, selling it to buy arms and supplies. Half of Gorongosa's elephants evolved to be tuskless. Hungry soldiers shot many more thousands of zebras, wildebeest, African buffalo, and other ungulates. Lions survived the war, but several species of top carnivore—leopard, African wild dog, and spotted hyena—were driven locally extinct.
A cease-fire agreement ended the civil war in 1992 but widespread hunting in the park continued for at least two more years. By that time many large mammal populations — including elephants, hippos, buffalo, zebras and lions — had been reduced by more than 95 percent. An aerial survey conducted in 1994 over 68 km2 of the park counted just 5 elephants, 6 waterbuck, 3 zebra, 12 reedbuck, and 1 oribi; buffalo and sable were not detected in aerial surveys until 2001, wildebeest until 2007, and eland until 2010.
Young male bushbuck
Post-war: 1995–2003[edit]
A preliminary effort to rebuild Gorongosa National Park's infrastructure and restore its wildlife began in 1994 when the African Development Bank (ADB) started work on a rehabilitation plan with assistance from the European Union and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Fifty new staff were hired, most of them former soldiers.
Restoration: 2004-present[edit]
In 2004 the Government of Mozambique and the US-based Carr Foundation agreed to work together to rebuild the park's infrastructure, restore its wildlife populations and spur local economic development—opening an important new chapter in the park's history.
Since the beginning of the project, aerial surveys of wildlife have shown sharp increases in the number of large animals.
In the aftermath of the 2019 Cyclone Idai, park rangers conducted rescue missions using their helicopter, boat, and tractor. According to Gorongosa Project president Gregory Carr, the park was "right in the middle of the impacted area". Roughly half the park was flooded due to the cyclone, but impacts to wildlife were expected to be minimal as the animals would be able to migrate to higher ground. The protection of this area was cited as a reason that the impacts of the flood on the human population were less severe, as the protected wilderness area can moderate the flow of water.
In March 2018, a leopard was captured on a park camera after 14 years, and additional leopards were reintroduced starting in 2020. In July 2018 and November 2019, two packs of African wild dogs from South Africa were reintroduced. Spotted hyena reintroductions began in July 2022.
