Etosha — Landseed

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Map key

Etosha National Park

Communal conservancies

Iconic wildlifetap a species ↗

African elephant

Lion

Black rhino

Black-faced impala

Plains zebra

Hartmann's mountain zebra

Blue wildebeest

Springbok

Gemsbok

Angolan giraffe

Blue crane

Lesser flamingo

Main roads

Waterhole / spring

Rest camp / gate

Distance to nearest waterhole

at water20 km40 km +

Mapped waterhole / spring89 in the park

Straight-line distance to the nearest waterhole mapped in OpenStreetMap, ringed every 5 km and clipped to the park. Real Etosha has unmapped water and pumped boreholes that come and go, so this is an upper bound, not a survey.

Altitude bands · 1,069–1,401 m in the park

Dolomite hills1,230–1,450

Karstveld1,160–1,230

Mopane woodland1,125–1,160

Dwarf shrub steppe1,100–1,125

Pan margin grassland1,085–1,100

Pan floor, saline1,076–1,085

Bands are altitude, not vegetation: mopane grows across most of the range shown, and the pan margin grades into dwarf shrub rather than meeting it at a contour.

Wildlife · population

Etosha National Park

22,935 km² of pan, dwarf-shrub steppe and mopane woodland in northern Namibia, wrapped around a salt pan visible from orbit. Its boundary runs some 825 km as digitised — about 1.5 times the 537 km a circle of equal area would need, which makes it a notably compact shape for a park this size. Almost all of that edge is fenced.

Area

22,935 km² gazetted

In 1907

~99,526 km² Game Reserve No. 2

Boundary

~825 km as digitised

Compactness

0.42 Polsby–Popper

Proclaimed

1907

Elevation

1,076 – 1,399 m

Proclaimed 1907 — as Game Reserve No. 2, by Ordinance 88 of the Governor of German South West Africa; national park in 1967

Cut to its present size in 1970 — following the Odendaal Commission, from roughly 99,526 km² to about a quarter of that

IUCN category II; the pan is a Ramsar-listed wetland and the only mass flamingo breeding ground in Namibia

Black rhino numbers here are deliberately not published by MEFT, as an anti-poaching measure — so this site shows none.

Area and dates: Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism (MEFT), Namibia. Boundary drawn from OpenStreetMap rel. 2982497. Note: unusually, that OSM ring measures 22,977 km² — within 0.2% of MEFT's gazetted 22,935 km², so the drawn outline and the stated area agree here to a degree that is unusual for an OSM protected-area ring. The widely repeated figure of 22,270 km² is 3.2% below both and is not used. Perimeter and compactness are computed from the OSM ring and are scale-dependent — the true fence line is longer. Elevation range is measured from the baked DEM inside the boundary, not quoted.