Kahuzi-Biega National Park

The gorilla population here has fallen roughly 80 percent since the mid-1990s, and the park has sat on UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger for over two decades. Any guide that sells you a breezy safari itinerary to Kahuzi-Biega without mentioning either fact is not being straight with you, and I want to correct both the rosy marketing and a few outright factual errors that keep circulating about this park before getting into what a visit actually looks like right now.

Where it is and what it protects

Kahuzi-Biega sits on the eastern edge of the Democratic Republic of Congo, straddling South Kivu and reaching into North Kivu, on the western wall of the Albertine Rift where the Congo Basin lowlands climb toward the East African highlands. The park is named for two extinct volcanoes, Mount Kahuzi and Mount Biega, and it spans a dramatic elevation gradient from high-altitude bamboo and heather zones down through montane forest to lowland rainforest and swamp. That elevation range is precisely why it matters biologically: it protects one continuous corridor of habitat for Grauer’s gorilla, also called the eastern lowland gorilla, which exists nowhere else on Earth.

One correction worth stating plainly: the okapi does not live in Kahuzi-Biega. That animal, the striped forest relative of the giraffe, is protected in the separate Okapi Wildlife Reserve, a different UNESCO site far to the north in Ituri province. The two parks get conflated constantly in tourist material, but they do not share territory, and you will not see an okapi on a Kahuzi-Biega trek no matter what an old blog post promises.

The gorillas, and the uncomfortable numbers

Grauer’s gorilla is the largest living primate subspecies, and before the civil wars of the 1990s and early 2000s, an estimated 16,900 of them lived across this region. Surveys from the following two decades put the number closer to 3,800, a decline of roughly 80 percent, driven overwhelmingly by armed conflict rather than the traditional narrative that blamed local Batwa communities for the losses. Mining camps run by armed groups relied on bushmeat, including gorillas, to feed fighters, and the collapse in gorilla numbers tracks almost exactly with periods of the heaviest fighting. Recent research has been explicit in pushing back on the older, simpler blame-the-locals story that circulated in conservation literature for years.

Trekking itself, where it still runs, works much like gorilla trekking in Rwanda or Uganda: small groups accompanied by armed rangers hike into the forest to spend a limited window with a habituated family group. Permits run around 400 US dollars for international visitors and are issued through the Congolese Institute for Nature Conservation, known by its French acronym ICCN, either directly or through an authorized operator. Given how few operators currently run trips, book three to six months ahead if you want any chance of a confirmed slot.

The honest access situation in 2026

This is the part most travel sites skip. Since the M23 rebel group’s renewed offensive, and especially since fighters entered Goma in January 2025, tourism in and around Kahuzi-Biega has effectively collapsed. Treks in the park’s better-known Chibati and Mugaba sectors, historically the easiest to reach from Bukavu, stopped running for ordinary tourists, and most established tour operators pulled Kahuzi-Biega off their brochures entirely. A handful of specialists with direct, current relationships to security contacts on the ground occasionally still manage tightly escorted visits when conditions allow, but this is not something to book casually through a general safari website. Satellite monitoring found more than 1,100 hectares of forest lost inside the park in 2023 alone, more than double the pre-conflict average, much of it tied to illegal logging and charcoal production that armed groups have taxed and protected rather than stopped.

My honest opinion: if you are weighing this against gorilla trekking in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park or Uganda’s Bwindi, both of which are stable, well-regulated, and see healthy mountain gorilla populations, choose one of those instead unless you have a specific, well-vetted operator with current ground intelligence on Kahuzi-Biega and a genuine reason to prioritize seeing Grauer’s gorilla specifically. This is not a park to add to a multi-country itinerary on a whim.

Getting there, when it is viable

Bukavu, the provincial capital of South Kivu, is the gateway, reachable by air or by road from Goma and other DRC cities. The park entrance and headquarters at Tshivanga sit only about 30 kilometers from Bukavu, a drive of roughly 90 minutes on rough roads by 4x4. Climate is tropical with two dry windows, June through August and a shorter one in the new year, and temperatures across the elevation range typically sit between 15 and 26 degrees Celsius, so pack for both damp forest floor and chilly high-altitude mornings.

Beyond gorillas, the park’s other wildlife includes elephants, chimpanzees, several monkey species, and over 350 recorded bird species including the Great Blue Turaco, though realistically almost nobody is visiting for the birdlife alone given the current security calculus.

Before you go: check your home country’s current travel advisory for eastern DRC the week you plan to fly, not months in advance, because the security picture around Bukavu and the park has changed within single weeks during the M23 resurgence.