Ngorongoro Conservation Area
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How it came to be
The Ngorongoro Conservation Area covers 809,440 hectares of northern Tanzania next to Serengeti National Park. At its centre is Ngorongoro Crater, the largest unbroken caldera in the world. In 1959 it was separated from the Serengeti as a multiple land use area in which wildlife shares the land with semi-nomadic Maasai pastoralists.
Oscar Baumann, in 1892, is the first European known to have visited the crater. In the 1950s Louis and Mary Leakey began excavating at Olduvai Gorge. At Laetoli, fossil footprints about 3.6 million years old record early human walking on two legs.
The area was inscribed in 1979 for its natural values and became a mixed site in 2010 for its evidence of human evolution. The Maasai population grew from about 8,700 in 1966 to 93,136 in 2017. Since 2021 the government has been moving residents to Msomera, about 600 km away; it describes the moves as voluntary, while Human Rights Watch reports that they were coercive.
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