Pendjari National Park shelters about a hundred West African lions — a quarter of every one left alive. Fewer than 400 of these Critically Endangered cats survive, scattered in fragments from Senegal to Chad, and this stretch of dry savanna in northern Benin is their strongest single refuge. The park runs along the Pendjari River, which draws the border with Burkina Faso, beneath the cliffs of the Atakora range, and forms the heart of the W-Arly-Pendjari complex — the largest unbroken wild landscape left in West Africa, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2017. The other survivors here are just as improbable: several hundred elephants, hippos, buffalo, roan antelope and hartebeest, and a few Northwest African cheetah that camera traps still catch. In 2017 Benin handed the park to the non-profit African Parks, which rebuilt the ranger force and reopened the camps.
Then the rains stop and the water goes. From December the pools shrink to a few muddy mares, and the animals have nowhere else to drink: elephant families come down through the fan palms, hartebeest stand in the shallows among rafts of spur-winged geese, and lions lie back in the yellow grass, waiting. Bare baobabs hold the sky above it all. But you cannot go and watch this. In May 2019 gunmen seized two French tourists inside Pendjari and killed their Beninese guide, and the park has been closed to visitors ever since. Armed groups pushing down from Burkina Faso and Niger have since made the wider complex a base — five African Parks rangers were killed in neighbouring W National Park in July 2024 — and UNESCO is now weighing whether to declare the complex World Heritage in Danger. The rangers stayed. The lions stayed. Only the visitors are gone.