Lewa was cattle country for over fifty years before it was anything else. The Craig family ran it as a ranch from 1922, and it might have stayed one, if not for a stark, practical problem in the early 1980s: Kenya’s black rhino population had collapsed under poaching, and there was almost nowhere left safe to put the survivors. In 1983 a section of the ranch was fenced, guarded and turned into the Ngare Sergoi Rhino Sanctuary. It worked. By 1995 the whole property had become Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, and the sanctuary that began as an emergency measure is now one of the most important rhino strongholds left in Africa, home to more than a tenth of Kenya’s entire eastern black rhino population alongside a thriving white rhino population of its own.
What makes Lewa different from every other park on this site is what that private status actually means for a visit. As a conservancy rather than a national park or reserve, Lewa sets its own rules, which means walking safaris, horseback safaris and night game drives are all genuinely possible here, ways of experiencing the bush that Kenya’s national parks simply don’t permit. It is also, quietly, the single most important place on Earth for the Grevy’s zebra, the world’s largest, most striking zebra species and one of its most endangered, with roughly a third of the entire wild population living on this one property.
Lewa’s conservation reach now extends well past its own fence line. In 2013 it was added to the Mount Kenya UNESCO World Heritage Site as an extension, connected by the Ngare Ndare Forest corridor, complete with an elephant underpass beneath the main road, that lets elephants move freely between Lewa and the Mount Kenya forests above it. And every June since 2000, the Lewa Safari Marathon has sent runners across open, unfenced wildlife territory, protected only by armed rangers and spotter aircraft, raising over ten million dollars for rhino and Grevy’s zebra conservation and for the communities that share this landscape.
