Virunga National Park is widely recognized as Africa’s oldest national park, formally established back in 1925, and on paper it remains one of the most extraordinary protected areas on the continent, home to mountain gorillas, an active lava lake on Mount Nyiragongo, and a landscape ranging from snow-capped peaks to steaming savanna and dense rainforest within a single park boundary. It is also, as of 2026, a park that honest travel guidance cannot responsibly recommend visiting, and any complete account of Virunga has to lead with that reality before it leads with the scenery.
A Park Unlike Any Other in Africa
Spanning roughly 7,800 square kilometers along the eastern edge of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Virunga stretches from the Virunga Mountains in the south, shared with Rwanda and Uganda, up through the Rwenzori foothills in the north, encompassing an astonishing range of ecosystems. The park holds part of the Virunga Massif’s mountain gorilla population, a significant population of eastern lowland habitat further west, forest elephants, chimpanzees, and the active volcano Mount Nyiragongo, whose crater holds one of the world’s largest permanent lava lakes. Before the current instability, an overnight hike to camp on Nyiragongo’s rim, looking down into the glowing lava below, was considered one of the most singular experiences available anywhere in African tourism, a genuine rival to gorilla trekking itself as the park’s headline activity for adventurous travelers.
Virunga’s location, straddling the Albertine Rift where the borders of the DRC, Rwanda, and Uganda meet, has always given it a complicated history. The park has weathered civil conflict, rebel occupation, and ranger casualties for decades, and its ranger corps has paid one of the highest costs of any conservation workforce in the world defending the park’s wildlife and boundaries.
A UNESCO World Heritage Site Since 1979
Virunga was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979, recognition of both its extraordinary biodiversity and its role as one of the last strongholds for several critically endangered species. It has also, since 1994, been listed as a World Heritage Site in Danger, a designation reflecting the persistent threats the park has faced from armed conflict, poaching, and encroachment over the past three decades. Despite this near-constant instability, Virunga’s ranger corps and management, including periods under the Virunga Foundation’s public-private partnership with the Congolese government, have managed to sustain core conservation programs and even grow the park’s small share of the region’s mountain gorilla population over time, a testament to the dedication of Congolese rangers who have continued this work under conditions few conservation professionals anywhere else in the world are asked to face. More than 200 Virunga rangers have lost their lives in the line of duty since the park’s modern ranger service was established, a figure that underscores just how dangerous protecting this particular stretch of Central African wilderness has been across recent decades of intermittent conflict.
The park’s biodiversity reflects its unusual north-south span across multiple climate zones. In the south, the Virunga Mountains rise into Afromontane forest and bamboo zones that support mountain gorillas alongside golden monkeys and a wealth of Albertine Rift endemic bird species. Moving north, the terrain drops into the savanna and wetlands surrounding Lake Edward, before rising again toward the glaciated peaks of the Rwenzori Mountains on the park’s northern boundary, a range that, remarkably, holds permanent glaciers despite sitting almost directly on the equator, a detail that surprises most first-time visitors who associate Central Africa exclusively with tropical heat rather than genuine alpine conditions.
The Current Situation: Why the Park Is Closed
Virunga has been closed to tourism since March 2020, initially due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and that closure has since been extended and deepened by a serious escalation in regional conflict. The M23 rebel movement’s capture of Goma, the largest city bordering the park, in early 2025 marked a significant turning point, and as of 2026 the park remains closed to visitors, with government travel advisories from the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union all recommending against travel to eastern DRC generally. Despite periodic hopes that conditions might allow a reopening, the security situation on the ground has not stabilized enough to support tourism, and Virunga’s own park authorities have prioritized ranger and wildlife safety over any resumption of visitor access.
This is a genuinely difficult reality for a park with this much ecological and cultural significance, and it is worth being direct about it rather than describing Virunga as though a visit were currently bookable. Travelers researching a Congo gorilla trekking trip in 2026 should instead look toward Kahuzi-Biega National Park’s eastern lowland gorillas when conditions there permit, or toward Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park and Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, both of which continue to operate mountain gorilla trekking safely and reliably on the other side of the same Virunga Massif ecosystem.
It is worth understanding that the mountain gorilla population itself spans this entire massif regardless of national borders, meaning gorillas that might otherwise have been tracked from the Congolese side are part of the same broader population protected across Rwanda, Uganda, and the DRC. This is a small silver lining in an otherwise difficult situation: the species conservation effort that Virunga has long been part of continues even while the DRC side of the ecosystem remains inaccessible, since Rwandan and Ugandan park authorities and their ranger teams continue active monitoring and protection work on their respective sides of the mountain range.
What a Virunga Visit Involved Before the Closure
In the years before the current closure, a Virunga visit typically combined gorilla trekking in the park’s southern sector near Bukima with the overnight Nyiragongo hike, a demanding but non-technical climb of around six hours to reach the crater rim, where basic shelters allowed visitors to sleep within sight of the lava lake’s nightly glow. Chimpanzee trekking was available in a separate sector, and boat trips on Lake Edward in the park’s central savanna zone offered a completely different wildlife encounter, with hippos, crocodiles, and abundant birdlife along the shoreline. This combination of activities, mountain gorillas, an active volcano, and savanna wildlife within one park, was what made Virunga genuinely unique even among East and Central Africa’s other exceptional parks.
Access before the closure was primarily through Goma, reachable by flight from Kigali or Kinshasa, with Virunga’s own tourism arm handling permits, accommodation bookings, and security logistics directly given the park’s history of instability even during periods when tourism was operating. Permit prices for gorilla trekking in Virunga were historically set notably lower than the equivalent permits in Rwanda, part of a deliberate strategy to make the park more competitive and to channel tourism revenue directly back into ranger salaries and community development programs in the surrounding region, one of the most impoverished parts of the country, an approach the park’s management long argued was essential to building local support for conservation in a region where poaching and encroachment pressure has historically been driven as much by poverty as by opportunism.
Looking Ahead
Virunga’s rangers and conservation staff have continued working to protect the park’s wildlife and infrastructure through previous periods of instability, and the park has reopened after past closures when security conditions allowed. Whether and when that happens again depends entirely on developments in the regional conflict that are well beyond any traveler’s ability to predict or influence, and it would be irresponsible for any travel guide to suggest a firm reopening timeline given how quickly conditions in the region have shifted over the past several years. For now, the most responsible guidance is to treat Virunga as a park to watch rather than to book, to follow official government travel advisories and the park authority’s own communications closely, and to consider that the underlying place, and the extraordinary conservation work still being carried out by its ranger corps under exceptionally difficult conditions, remains real and worth caring about even while it is closed to outside visitors. Travelers with a genuine interest in supporting Virunga’s conservation mission during this period can look into the Virunga Foundation, which continues to fund ranger operations and community programs even without tourism revenue.
For travelers building an East Africa itinerary in the meantime, it is entirely possible to experience the essence of what draws people to Virunga, mountain gorilla trekking, volcanic highland scenery, and Albertine Rift biodiversity, without setting foot in an active conflict zone. Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park and Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and Mgahinga Gorilla National Park sit within the same volcanic mountain chain and ecosystem, offering a comparably profound encounter with mountain gorillas under stable, well-established tourism infrastructure. Many travelers who once dreamed specifically of a Congo gorilla trek find that these neighboring parks deliver an equally moving experience, and some maintain a long-term hope of eventually adding a Virunga visit once conditions genuinely allow, treating it as a future chapter rather than an abandoned plan, one worth revisiting periodically as the security situation in eastern DRC continues to evolve in the years ahead.
