Lake Mburo National Park is the smallest of Uganda’s savannah game parks – measuring 370 square kilometres. Given that safari drives to all of Uganda’s major game parks in the southwest are long – lasting more than 9 hours, Lake Mburo National Park has emerged as a common stop to break the drives.
Lake Mburo National Park is the only place in southern Uganda to see Zebras and the only park in Uganda with Impalas. On a game drive, you can also look for hyenas, leopards, topi, the rare eland and the recently reintroduced Rothschild’s giraffe.
Some of the 325 bird species include martial eagles and red-faced barbets in the acacia wooded savannah and papyrus yellow warblers and African finfoots in the wetlands.
Together with 13 other lakes in the area Lake Mburo forms part of a 50km-long wetland system linked by a swamp. Five of these lakes lie within the park’s borders. Once covered by open savannah, Lake Mburo National Park now contains much woodland as there are no elephants to tame the vegetation.
The nearest game park to Kampala, the capital, Lake Mburo is found 228 kilometres from Kampala and 60 kilometres from Mbarara town (nearest town to this under-rated park). A drive to Lake Mburo from Kampala takes about four hours and the drive from Mbarara takes about one hour.
