A brief history of the Kruger National Park

Former Transvaal Republic president Paul Kruger took the first steps in forming what is today the Kruger National Park. With unregulated hunting and an outbreak of rinderpest in the area in 1896, the game in the Lowveld was being depleted at an alarming rate. This led Kruger to proclaim the Sabie Game Reserve in 1898, a 4,600km² protected area between the Crocodile and Sabie rivers. In 1903, a second game reserve, Shingwedzi Game Reserve, was declared. On May 31 1926 the two reserves were merged and the Kruger National Park was officially formed with the proclamation of the National Parks Act.

For a fee of £1, the first motorists entered the park in 1927. Today this fee is R105 for adults and R52 for children, if they are South African citizens. People from Southern African Development Community countries pay double and international tourists more than four times the local rates. The popularity the park experienced when it first opened to day visitors has only increased. It remains the oldest and largest park under SANParks’s administration and is one of SA’s most popular tourist destinations. Today the

Kruger National Park also forms part of the 37,572km² Great Limpopo Transfrontier

Park, a region that was proclaimed in 2002 with the signing of a treaty between SA, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. It links the Kruger with the Limpopo National Park in Mozambique and Gonarezhou National Park, Manjinji Pan Sanctuary and Malipati Safari Area in Zimbabwe. This is only the first phase, however. Once completed, a bigger transfrontier conservation area will cover close to 100,000km², which will make it the biggest game reserve in the world.