Gorongosa National Park is at the southern end of the Great African Rift Valley in the heart of central Mozambique, Southeast Africa.

Grasslands are dotted with patches of acacia trees, savannah, dry forest on sands and seasonally rain-filled pans, and termite hill thickets.

This combination of unique features at one time supported some of the densest wildlife populations in all of Africa, including charismatic carnivores, herbivores, and over 500 bird species.

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 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.

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.

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.

Feeling threatened by FRELIMO's new one-party government in Mozambique, neighbouring Rhodesia and South Africa began arming and supplying RENAMO.

[7] In December 1981 the Mozambican National Resistance (MNR, or RENAMO) fighters attacked the Chitengo campsite and kidnapped several staff members, including two foreign scientists.

[9] Lions survived the war, but several species of top carnivore—leopard, African wild dog, and spotted hyena—were driven locally extinct.

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.

Mozambique's tropical savanna climate, with an annual cycle of wet and dry seasons, has added another factor to the complex equation: constant change in soil moisture that varies with elevation.

This constant expansion and retraction of the floodplains, amidst a patchwork of savanna, woodland, and thickets, creates a complex mosaic of smaller ecosystems that support a greater abundance and diversity of wildlife than anywhere else in the park.

Tree cover increased throughout the park in the decades following the Mozambican Civil War, likely due to the dramatic declines of large herbivores such as elephants during that period.

Both plateaus are covered with a kind of closed-canopy savanna, widespread in southern Africa, called "miombo", after the Swahili word for the dominant tree, a member of the genus Brachystegia.