Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Kigali
Population: 14.5 million+
Language: Kinyarwanda, English, French and Kiswahili
1 – Volcano National Park (also above)
Volcanoes National Park, in the misty highlands of north-western Rwanda, protects five of the eight Virunga volcanoes and grew from a gorilla reserve of 1925, often called Africa’s first national park, one of the last homes of the endangered mountain gorilla.
Treks in Volcanoes National Park climb through bamboo and forest to spend an hour a few metres from a family of wild mountain gorillas, while the park also shelters golden monkeys, and its peaks include Karisimbi, at 4,507 m Rwanda’s highest point.
The American primatologist Dian Fossey founded the Karisoke research centre here in 1967 and studied the gorillas for some 18 years, until she was murdered in her cabin in December 1985 in a killing never solved, a story told in the film Gorillas in the Mist, and she lies at Karisoke beside her favourite gorilla, Digit.
2 – Akagera National Park
Akagera National Park, founded in 1934 on the Tanzanian border in eastern Rwanda, is the country’s last refuge for savanna wildlife, a mosaic of grassland, acacia woodland and papyrus-fringed lakes that forms one of Central Africa’s largest protected wetlands.
The wildlife of Akagera was badly hit after 1994, but since African Parks took over its management with the Rwandan government in 2010, lions, black rhinos and white rhinos have been brought back, while boat trips on Lake Ihema pass hippos, crocodiles and occasionally the rare shoebill.
Akagera takes its name from the Kagera River along its eastern edge, the largest river feeding Lake Victoria, whose headwaters include streams in Rwanda’s Nyungwe Forest that a 2006 expedition claimed as the most distant source of the Nile.
3 – Lake Kivu
Lake Kivu, cradled among steep green hills on Rwanda’s border with DR Congo, is one of the African Great Lakes of the Albertine Rift, its shore lined with easygoing towns such as Gisenyi and Kibuye.
Lake Kivu is generally considered free of hippos and crocodiles, which makes it popular for swimming, kayaking and boat trips out to its many islands.
Lake Kivu is one of only three lakes known for limnic eruptions, along with Nyos and Monoun in Cameroon, its depths holding vast amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide and methane, which the KivuWatt plant extracts to generate electricity.
4 – Musanze Caves
The Musanze Caves, near the town of Musanze at the foot of the Virunga volcanoes, run for about 2 km through lava from the Bisoke and Sabyinyo volcanoes, opening through a huge main entrance and 31 holes where the roof has fallen in.
Visitors explore the Musanze Caves with a guide, helmet and torch, through dark, echoing chambers where bats roost, in caves that archaeology shows people were using as early as the Iron Age.
The Musanze Caves gave shelter in wartime for centuries, and during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi they were the scene of a massacre, so visitors are asked to treat them with respect.
5 – Kigali
Kigali grew from the administrative post that the German resident Richard Kandt set up on Nyarugenge hill in 1907, became Rwanda’s capital at independence in 1962, and in 1994 was at the centre of the genocide against the Tutsi, in which more than 800,000 people were murdered in about 100 days by UN estimates, over one million by the Rwandan government’s count.
The Kigali Genocide Memorial at Gisozi, where more than 250,000 victims are buried, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2023 with the memorials at Nyamata, Murambi and Bisesero, and in October 1994 Ireland’s President Mary Robinson came to Kigali as the first head of state to visit Rwanda after the genocide.
On the last Saturday of each month, from 8 to 11 am, the people of Kigali and all Rwanda aged 18 to 65 turn out for umuganda, a national morning of community work in which even the president takes part.
6 – The King’s Palace at Nyanza
Nyanza, in Rwanda’s southern hills, became the first permanent royal capital in 1899, when Mwami Yuhi V Musinga settled his court here, and stayed the seat of the monarchy until 1961, when it was abolished at a Belgian-backed meeting at Gitarama and confirmed by a UN-supervised referendum.
The King’s Palace at Nyanza includes a reconstruction of the royal residence, a great beehive-shaped dome of thatch with huts for milk and beer beside it, and the Western-style palace the Belgians built in the early 1930s for Mwami Mutara III Rudahigwa, who in 1946 dedicated Rwanda to Christ.
Long-horned Inyambo cattle, once the pride of the royal herds, are kept at the King’s Palace at Nyanza, where their keepers serenade them with traditional poems.
7 – Nyungwe Forest National Park
Nyungwe National Park, straddling the Congo–Nile divide in south-western Rwanda, is one of Africa’s largest and oldest montane rainforests, a national park since 2005 and, in 2023, Rwanda’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Thirteen kinds of primate live in Nyungwe, about a quarter of Africa’s species, from chimpanzees to troops of Angolan colobus, alongside more than 300 bird species, and a canopy walkway runs high above a forested ravine.
Nyungwe supplies much of Rwanda’s fresh water, and rain falling on one side of its ridge drains to the Congo and the Atlantic, while streams on the other side feed the Nile, among the most distant of its sources.