Niokolo-Koba is the last place on earth where the western giant eland still runs wild. The biggest antelope in the world — a bull carries spiralled horns close to a metre long — survives here in one population, put at roughly 195 animals by a camera-trap study and holding largely to the ground around Mont Assirik, the park's 311-metre high point. The park covers 9,130 square kilometres of Sudano-Guinean savanna in south-eastern Senegal, threaded by the upper Gambia River, which rises in the highlands of Guinea and runs through here between borassus fan palms and thick gallery forest. UNESCO listed it in 1981; then poaching and a basalt quarry hollowed it out, and in 2007 it went onto the List of World Heritage in Danger. Seventeen years later that was reversed: in July 2024 the committee took the park back off the danger list, after anti-poaching patrols spread across the whole park. The lions tell the same story — the first systematic survey, in 2011, counted 10 to 15 West African lions; at least 40 live here now.
In the dry season everything turns on water. From the mirador above Simenti you look down on a bend of the Gambia where roan antelope and buffalo walk down to drink in tens, hippos snort in the shallows and crocodiles lie out on the sand. Warthog families cross the grass in single file with their tails straight up, and herons and kingfishers work the water's edge. Walking is allowed only with a ranger, and it is the ranger who reads the ground for you. Be honest about what you will not see: the chimpanzees of Mont Assirik keep to the remote interior, and the park's elephants are all but gone. What is left is rare enough — a West African savanna still whole enough to keep its own lions.