Inside Bazaruto Archipelago National Park what changed when African Parks took the helm
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In 2017, Bazaruto Archipelago National Park became the first marine park in the portfolio of African Parks — the Johannesburg-headquartered non-profit known for reviving terrestrial reserves like Akagera and Zakouma under long-term management agreements with governments. The deal, signed with Mozambique’s national conservation agency ANAC, put one of Africa’s oldest marine protected areas under the continent’s best-known protected-area manager. Nearly a decade on, it is worth taking stock of what that partnership means on the water. For the visitor-facing version, EKAYA — a locally-owned Vilanculos operator working inside the park — publishes a thorough plain-language guide to Bazaruto Archipelago National Park: the five islands, the fees, the rules, the seasons.
The park, briefly
Bazaruto Archipelago National Park protects five islands — Bazaruto, Benguerra, Magaruque, Santa Carolina, and Bangué — and 143,000 hectares of the surrounding Indian Ocean, off the town of Vilanculos in southern Mozambique. Declared in 1971 explicitly to protect the dugong and nesting sea turtles, it is among the oldest marine protected areas in Africa; the boundary was expanded in 2001 to bring Bazaruto and Santa Carolina islands fully inside.
Its conservation assets read like a regional short-list: East Africa’s last viable dugong population (an estimated 250–350 animals, per the IUCN Marine Mammal Protected Areas Task Force), the only site in the western Indian Ocean where all five regional sea turtle species nest, reefs recording over 2,000 fish species, humpback whales in transit June to November, and about 5,800 residents in island fishing communities whose livelihoods depend on the same waters. In 2018, the year after co-management began, the area was declared part of an Important Marine Mammal Area — an expert-assessed recognition of its significance for the dugong above all.
What co-management looks like in practice
African Parks’ model is unglamorous by design: long-term mandate, funded operations, law enforcement, community programmes. At Bazaruto Archipelago National Park that has translated into rangers and patrol boats on a body of water that previously saw thin enforcement — gill nets are the dugong’s main killer, and net patrols are dugong conservation in its most literal form — alongside structured community engagement with the island villages, whose fishers, both men and women, work the park’s waters under its rules.
The revenue model runs through visitors. Every person entering the park pays a daily conservation fee — as of mid-2026, 900 meticais for international visitors, 600 for SADC nationals, 400 for Mozambicans, plus a snorkelling fee — collected at the park office in Vilanculos. The fees fund the patrols and community work; the science side is reinforced by the Bazaruto Center for Scientific Studies, whose researchers have satellite-tagged critically endangered scalloped hammerheads and other sharks inside the park.
None of this makes Bazaruto a finished story. Dugong numbers in the low hundreds leave no margin; enforcement across 143,000 hectares of ocean is never absolute. But the trajectory — old park, renewed management, funded protection, measurable science — is the one conservationists ask for and rarely get.
Visiting a working conservation area
For travelers, the park’s working machinery is mostly invisible — which is as it should be — but touching it is straightforward. Day boats cross from Vilanculos daily; operators licensed for the park fold the conservation fees into their pricing and run under park rules on speed, anchoring, and wildlife distance — park-literate tourism, experienced from the deck of a boat.
Marine parks age badly when nobody funds the middle years. Bazaruto Archipelago National Park is the counter-example: fifty-five years old, under active management, its founding species still present. On a continent rightly proud of its terrestrial parks, its first African Parks-managed marine park is quietly becoming the reference case.
Sources: African Parks, Bazaruto Archipelago National Park; IUCN Marine Mammal Protected Areas Task Force; Bazaruto Center for Scientific Studies.