Mozambique Works to Attract Big Spenders to National Parks

Mozambique plans to draw tourists back to its national parks by encouraging international hotel chains to provide luxury accommodation and so end the image of the existing tourism facilities as being old huts and tents with no showers.

The government said it would put out tenders soon for hotel building inside the Maputo special reserve in the country's south, part of a network of transnational parks that link Mozambique, South Africa and Swaziland.

The tourism ministry hopes that better and more extensive accommodation will bring more mainstream tourists, particularly wealthy Americans and Europeans in place of the more adventurous but often lower-spending travelers who now visit Mozambique. There are hopes of a boost from the football fans going to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Mozambique also has the magnet of the efforts it has made to replenish its parks. Animals have been shipped from South Africa, particularly from the Kruger national park. Thousands of elephants, zebras and kudus have been moved across the border over the past five years at a cost of more than £500,000.

But the park, formerly known as the Maputo elephant reserve, an area of scrub land, forest and mangrove swamps south of the capital, is still in a battle generally to revive its wildlife, damaged during the 17-year civil war that ended in 1992.

The park was established by the country's Portuguese colonizers to protect elephants from ivory poachers as they migrated along the Futi channel between the Maputo reserve and the Tembe reserve in South Africa. In 1975, large numbers of game were relocated from South Africa to the Maputo reserve. Only about 200 elephants and no rhinoceros survived the civil war. Other animals, including hippos, antelopes, and zebras, are there now, though they can be harder to spot than in parks of neighboring countries.

In the Gorongosa park, in central Mozambique, the elephant population fell from more than 7,000 before the civil war to only about 110 after it. The number of impalas, popular as bush meat among the combatants, dropped from 10,000 to only a few dozen.

Officials say the Maputo reserve is still home to many types of birds attracted to its saline lakes, and there is no shortage of crocodiles. "The area has different kinds of flora and fauna and it is favorable to different types of tourism," said Bartolomeu Soto, of the tourism ministry.

Botswana, home to the largest elephant population in Africa, has also been helping restock Mozambique's parks.

Mozambique has already had some success in drawing in tourists to the islands off its coast, where luxury accommodation is in demand, and there are cruise liners sailing in from Durban. A clutch of hotels has been built in Maputo. But there are still dangers off the beaten track, particularly from the vast numbers of land mines planted during the civil war.