About the park
About Chobe National Park: size, four areas and the DWNP
About 11,700 km² of northern Botswana, from the Chobe River at Kasane to the Savuti marsh and the Linyanti swamps. A game reserve from 1960 and a national park since 1968, run by the Department of Wildlife and National Parks.
If you only want the answer
Chobe National Park covers about 11,700 km² of northern Botswana in four areas: the Chobe Riverfront next to Kasane, the Savuti marsh, the Linyanti swamps and the Nogatsaa pans. It was proclaimed a game reserve in 1960 and a national park in 1968, and the Department of Wildlife and National Parks runs it, while private operators run its campsites and lodges.
How big is Chobe National Park?
About 11,700 km², the figure Botswana Tourism Organisation gives. The area reported to the World Database on Protected Areas is 11,000 km², the 2018 elephant survey worked with 10,740 km², and a thesis drawing on the 1986 to 1989 Chobe District Development Plan gives 11,030 km² at independence, about half of a 22,039 km² district. The differences come from boundary changes and how each body measures, and none of them is published by DWNP itself.
The legal boundary is a written description in the First Schedule of the Wildlife Conservation and National Parks Act, starting in the middle of the Chobe River at the edge of Kasane township and returning along the river from Ngoma. In practice that means the park meets the town at Sedudu Gate, about 7 km by road from Kasane's centre, and that the Kasane and Kazungula lodges sit outside it.
When did Chobe become a national park?
The Chobe Game Reserve was established by High Commissioner's Notice No. 65 of 1960, after provisional boundaries had been mapped in 1938, and it opened to tourists the same year. Its northern boundary ran along the Chobe River but was drawn around the settlements; in 1961 local sub-chiefs objected to its boundaries and restrictions at the Kasane district council. The reserve became a national park in 1968, the status year recorded by the World Database on Protected Areas and by Botswana Tourism Organisation.
Some sources give 1967, the year of the Act that elevated the reserve to a national park. The gazette notice of the proclamation itself is not available online, so both years appear in print. The residents of the old saw-mill settlement at Serondela on the Riverfront were moved out of the park; today Serondela is a picnic site.
The four areas that organise your trip
| Area | What it is | How you get in |
|---|---|---|
| Chobe Riverfront | Floodplain and riverine woodland along the Chobe from Sedudu Gate in the east to Ngoma Gate in the west, with the old Serondela site between; the park's busiest section | Sedudu Gate from Kasane or Ngoma Gate; day visits common; Ihaha campsite and Chobe Game Lodge inside |
| Savuti | The Savuti marsh on the floor of the Mababe Depression, the Savuti Channel and the Gubatsa Hills | Ghoha Gate from Kasane via Kachikau, or Mababe Gate from Maun and Khwai; about 165 km from Kasane |
| Linyanti | The Linyanti River and swamps on the park's north-western edge, next to private concessions | Along the Linyanti track from Savuti; Linyanti campsite with five sites |
| Nogatsaa and the Ngwezumba pans | Interior mopane woodland and clay pans whose water depends on rain and pumped boreholes | Interior tracks from Kasane; Nogatsaa campsite and Nogatsaa Pans lodge |
The Chobe Riverfront and its flood
The river that gives the park its name floods from about March to May, and the water is mostly the Zambezi's. When the Zambezi rises it backs up behind a fault line near Impalila Island and pushes water east and down the Chobe from about the start of March; between 2000 and 2014 the Chobe peaked between 1 March and 17 May, and it is usually back to bank-full by mid-July. Lowest water is in October, when the dried-out interior sends elephants and buffalo to the river.
The floodplain holds Botswana's only puku, a small and isolated population restricted to the Chobe's floodplains, and the island of Sedudu, about 3.5 km² in the river opposite Kasane. Botswana and Namibia both claimed it until the International Court of Justice ruled on 13 December 1999 that the northern channel is the main channel and the island is Botswana's, with navigation around it left open to both countries' craft.
Savuti: the marsh and the channel that comes and goes
Savuti is the park's south-western heart: open grassland on the heavy clay of an ancient lakebed, fed by rain in the wet season and, in some decades, by the Savuti Channel. The channel carries overflow from the Linyanti system and flows or dries for years at a time, independently of local rain. Sources agree on a flow phase in the 1960s and 1970s, a dry spell from the early 1980s, water reaching the marsh again by January 2010, a major flow from 2013 to about 2015 and drying from 2016. In June 2026 water was reported back in the upper channel; whether it has reached the marsh inside the park has not been reported.
The clay plains are a wet-season range for migrating zebra, and Savuti's lions are known in the scientific literature for hunting young elephants in the late dry season. In the Gubatsa Hills are rock paintings first described in print in 1969; their age and makers have not been established in the sources we found.
Who runs the park: the DWNP
Chobe is managed by Botswana's Department of Wildlife and National Parks, part of the Ministry of Environment and Tourism. The department grew out of an Elephant Control Unit formed in 1956 to protect crops, which became the Game Department in 1961 and was renamed the Department of Wildlife and National Parks in 1964. Its Chobe District office is in Kasane (Regional Wildlife Officer, +267 625 0486), and park rules, from gate hours to the 40 km/h limit and the ban on walking, are set in the National Parks and Game Reserves Regulations.
DWNP runs the gates and collects the fees but has no website and takes no campsite bookings: the four public campsites are run by private concessionaires, and the lodges inside the park are privately operated.
Part of KAZA
Chobe lies in the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, KAZA, created by a treaty signed by the heads of state of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe in Luanda in August 2011. It covers about 520,000 km², and its secretariat is in Kasane.
That matters for the numbers you read. The 2022 KAZA survey estimated about 132,000 elephants in Botswana's part of KAZA, but the elephants move between the park, the forest reserves, the Chobe Enclave and Namibia within a season. The figure for the park itself comes from the 2018 dry-season survey: about 15,400 in the park's survey strata, down from 26,609 in 2010.
Sources
- Protected Planet (WDPA): Chobe National Park, site 600 (checked 4 Oct 2026)
- Botswana Tourism Organisation: Chobe National Park (checked 4 Oct 2026)
- Gumbo, G.B. (2010), Economic and social change in the communities of the wetlands of Chobe and Ngamiland, PhD thesis, University of Cape Town (checked 4 Oct 2026)
- International Court of Justice: Kasikili/Sedudu Island (Botswana/Namibia) (checked 4 Oct 2026)
- Burke, Pricope & Blum (2016), Remote Sensing 8(8): 676, Chobe River flood dynamics (checked 4 Oct 2026)
- Elephants Without Borders: Dry Season Aerial Survey of Northern Botswana, July to October 2018 (checked 4 Oct 2026)
- KAZA TFCA Secretariat: About KAZA (checked 4 Oct 2026)