Serengeti National Park

Where it sits. The Serengeti covers 14,763 km² of northern Tanzania, spread across the eastern Mara Region and the north-east of Simiyu Region, and forms the southern two-thirds of an ecosystem it shares with Kenya's Maasai Mara. The name comes from the Maasai siringet — the land that runs on forever — and the south-eastern quarter earns it: treeless short-grass plain laid over volcanic ash blown from the Ngorongoro highlands and Ol Doinyo Lengai, so flat that a vehicle is visible ten kilometres away. Northwards the ground breaks into acacia woodland along the Grumeti and Mbalageti rivers, and at the Kenyan border the Lamai wedge rises above the Mara River. Scattered through the plains are kopjes — islands of ancient granite worn round by weathering, which hold water, shade and, reliably, lions.

The story behind it. Colonial hunting reserves gave way to a national park whose boundaries were finalised in 1951, a process that involved restricting and then removing Maasai residents from land they had grazed for generations. In 1959 an 8,300 km² block in the east was detached and re-established as the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a multiple-use zone where Maasai pastoralism and wildlife share the ground — an arrangement that still governs the calving plains. The Serengeti Research Institute was founded at Seronera in 1966 and produced the long-run data that made this the best-understood large ecosystem in the world. UNESCO inscribed the park as a World Heritage Site in 1981. A proposed highway across the northern park has been fought over repeatedly since 2010, with conservationists arguing it would sever the migration.

On screen. The Serengeti's international fame was manufactured by one documentary. Bernhard Grzimek, director of the Frankfurt Zoo, and his son Michael flew a zebra-striped light aircraft over the plains in the late 1950s to count animals and map where the herds actually went — data that mattered because the park's boundaries had been drawn without it. Michael was killed during the work when his aircraft collided with a vulture. The film they made, Serengeti Shall Not Die, was released in 1959 and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1960; the accompanying book carried the argument to a mass European readership, and father and son are buried together on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater. The Dutch filmmaker Hugo van Lawick then spent decades based at Ndutu on the southern plains, producing among much else the theatrical feature The Leopard Son (1996). Almost every subsequent big-budget wildlife series has worked here, and the visual grammar of "African savanna" in fiction film descends largely from footage shot on these plains.

The migration. Around 1.5 million wildebeest with a quarter of a million zebra and several hundred thousand gazelle follow the rain on a circuit of roughly 800 kilometres. Calving concentrates on the short-grass plains in the south from late January into March, where the ash-derived soils are rich in calcium and phosphorus and where roughly half a million calves are dropped within a few weeks — the largest predator feast on earth. The herds move west through the corridor toward the Grumeti from May to July, then north across the Mara River, and return south with the short rains from November.

What you actually see. The Seronera valley in the centre holds resident game year-round, with leopard in the sausage trees along the river and lion on the kopjes; Moru Kopjes in the south-west has Maasai rock paintings and a granite gong that rings when struck; the Western Corridor follows the Grumeti and its very large crocodiles; the northern Lamai and Kogatende sector is the quietest and best placed for the Mara crossings. Balloon flights operate from Seronera and Ndutu. Leopard density here has been estimated at around five animals per hundred square kilometres in the dry season, which is high by any standard and explains why the river-line drives at Seronera are worked so hard by guides. Park fees are among the highest in Africa and are charged per 24 hours, which shapes most itineraries more than anything else.

Getting there and timing. Most road visitors arrive from Arusha through the Ngorongoro highlands and enter at Naabi Hill gate, four to five hours' drive; scheduled flights serve Seronera, Kogatende and Ndutu from Arusha and Kilimanjaro. June to October is the dry season, with easy tracks and concentrated game; late January to March covers the calving in the south. The long rains from March to May close some camps and make the black cotton soil in the west genuinely impassable.