Kruger National Park: Roughly the Size of New Jersey, Built From Two Colonial-Era Reserves

Kruger National Park covers roughly 19,623 square kilometers, about 7,576 square miles, stretching 360 kilometers from north to south along South Africa’s border with Mozambique and averaging some 65 kilometers across. That footprint puts it in the same range as the US state of New Jersey, whose total area runs to about 22,600 square kilometers, a comparison frequently used to give visitors an intuitive sense of scale for a park most will only see a small fraction of during any single visit. Among protected wildlife areas, that size places Kruger among the largest national parks anywhere in the world and gives it more large mammal species living within a single reserve than any other in Africa.

The park did not begin as a single unified space. Its origins trace to 1898, when Paul Kruger, then president of the South African Republic (the old Transvaal Boer republic, distinct from the present-day country), signed off on the creation of the Sabi Game Reserve to address alarming declines in wildlife populations from unregulated hunting in the region south of the Sabie River. A second reserve, the Shingwedzi Reserve, was proclaimed in 1903 further north, named for the Shingwedzi River running through it. For more than two decades the two reserves operated separately, managed under early conservation regulations that were themselves a novelty for the region at the time. In 1926, South Africa’s National Parks Act combined the Sabi and Shingwedzi reserves along with adjoining farmland into a single protected area, formally established as Kruger National Park and named in honor of the president whose original 1898 proclamation had set the process in motion, even though he did not live to see the merger; Kruger died in exile in Switzerland in 1904.

That founding act set Kruger on a trajectory of sustained wildlife recovery over the following century. Aerial and ground surveys conducted periodically by South African National Parks have tracked population trends for the park’s major species: impala numbers have run well over 130,000 in various counts, occasionally cited near 176,000, making them the park’s most numerous large herbivore by a wide margin. African buffalo have numbered in the range of 35,000 to 37,000, plains zebra populations have fluctuated between roughly 24,000 and 35,000, and African bush elephants have generally counted between 13,000 and nearly 14,000 in recent decades, a dramatic recovery from historically depleted numbers earlier in the twentieth century. Lion counts have been considerably smaller and more variable, typically estimated between 1,600 and 2,000 across the park, reflecting both the ecological reality that apex predators exist in far lower numbers than their prey and the greater difficulty of counting a wide-ranging, elusive species accurately.

Kruger today functions as the anchor of the larger Greater Kruger area and the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, a cross-border conservation zone linking it with reserves in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, extending the ecosystem the 1926 merger first stitched together well beyond South Africa’s own borders. The park remains one of the continent’s most visited wildlife destinations, drawing over a million visitors annually who come for the same “Big Five” game, lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo, and rhino, whose populations the century-old conservation project was originally designed to save from collapse.