Lying in the extreme South of the country, on the coast, t is a thin tongue of beach, dunes, savanna, and rain-forest, between Mayumba and the Congo border. Mayumba National Park shelters 60 km of the most important leatherback turtle nesting beaches on Earth and is home to unique coastal vegetation and a variety of terrestrial animals, including forest elephants, buffaloes, leopards, gorillas, chimpanzees, antelopes, crocodiles, hippos, and several species of monkeys. It also stretches for 15 km out to sea, protecting important marine habitats for dolphins, sharks, and migrating humpback whales. It is Gabon’s only primarily marine park.

Of course, it should be carefully managed, but it seems quite likely that many of these species would not survive, were all of the rainforest outside the park get cut down. We can hope that these areas are not going to be cut down, but should that happen, we need to make sure that so called buffer zones survive outside national parks, as without this, many of these national parks could become reserves only on paper.

One of the rare species to see in this reserve, is the Mandrill.