Queen Elizabeth National Park: five sectors, a highway and eleven villages

Five sectors, and the hours between them

Treat Queen Elizabeth as five places rather than one. Mweya sits on a peninsula between Lake Edward and the Kazinga Channel and holds the visitor hub, the marina and the launch cruise. Kasenyi lies north of the channel on the Lake George side and is where the plains game drives are. Kyambura Gorge cuts into the Kichwamba escarpment to the east and holds the chimpanzees. Katwe is the salt lake village to the west, with the crater country behind it. Ishasha is the whole southern arm of the park, and it is nothing like the rest of it.

The mistake people make is booking Mweya and expecting to fit Ishasha into an afternoon. The drive is about 109 kilometres and two and a half to three hours each way, over murram rather than tarmac. Two official sources build that number: UWA's brochure places Mweya 22 kilometres west of the Kasese to Mbarara road, and the Ministry of Works and Transport describes the Katunguru to Ishasha corridor as 87 kilometres, in a statement of 14 August 2026. A routing calculation over the mapped road network gives 107 kilometres for the same journey, within two per cent of the official addition.

The park-wide speed limit of 40 km/h alone puts 109 kilometres at 2.7 hours before a single stop, which is why the two hours quoted on operator pages does not survive contact with the road. Five to six hours of driving in a day, in a park where the predators are active early and late, makes a day trip from Mweya possible and unwise.

Where no official distance has been published, the figure comes from a routing calculation over the OpenStreetMap road network, retrieved on 18 September 2026. Those give free-flow times, which in western Uganda run optimistic on murram roads with cattle, boda-bodas, villages and rain damage. Add 25 to 50 per cent, and more in the wet season. As a check on the method: the router gives Kampala to Mweya as 411 km where UWA's own park page says 410.

The public road through the middle

An ordinary public highway runs straight through Queen Elizabeth National Park and crosses the Kazinga Channel at the Katunguru bridge. It is the Mbarara to Bushenyi and Ishaka to Katunguru to Kikorongo to Kasese to Fort Portal to Mpondwe road, and Ugandan sources name it by its towns rather than by a number. Mapping data labels it the A5; whether that is an official Ugandan route number or a mapping convention is unconfirmed, and Uganda does not signpost route numbers in practice.

This is an international trade route that happens to pass through a national park. The engineering review of the Katunguru bridge commissioned for the Ministry of Works and Transport says the bridge completes the western spur of the Northern Corridor Route, which extends from the port of Mombasa through the Malaba and Busia border posts to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo via border towns including Mpondwe and Ishasha, and calls it a key economic enabler for both regional trade and tourism.

On whether you can drive through without paying park entry, UWA has published no position at all, and that absence is itself the honest answer. The park page does not address it, the tariff does not address it including in its park rules, the FAQ page still carries placeholder text, and the visitor guide page is empty; all four were checked on 18 September 2026. The only source that answers the question directly is a tour operator page, which is marketing rather than policy. What is clear is where the line falls: turn off the highway onto a game track and you are into park entry plus activity fees, with self-guided game driving priced separately at $10 per vehicle per day on top of entry. That is an inference from the existence of that fee and the rule against driving off the tracks, rather than a quoted rule.

From the highway itself people routinely see elephant, buffalo, Uganda kob and warthog on the verges, and the Katunguru bridge looks down on the channel with hippos in it. The park pays for the arrangement: UWA records that speeding traffic has killed lions here, and where the anti-elephant trenches are interrupted by public roads it installs gate rollers to stop animals walking out through the gap.

One thing to plan around for 2027 and beyond. The existing Katunguru bridge is 60 metres long with a carriageway only 5 metres wide, 3 metres of clearance and no footways. The review published by the ministry in April 2026 found eroded foundations, vegetation clogging the openings and reduced freeboard clearance against projected rising lake levels, and judged the crossing liable to become impassable during flood events. A replacement of 225 metres with a 7 metre carriageway and two footways is planned, with Centunion S.A. as EPC contractor. No start date or construction programme has been published, and this is the only road crossing of the channel.

Eleven fishing villages inside the boundary

People live in this park, legally and in numbers. Eleven fishing villages sit as enclaves in or against the boundary: Rwenshama, Kisenyi, Katunguru in Kasese district, Kashaka, Kahendero, Kasenyi, Kayanja, Hamukungu, Katunguru in Bushenyi district, Kazinga and Katwe-Kabatoro. They date from the park's creation, when the landscape had been largely emptied by smallpox, rinderpest and sleeping sickness between 1913 and 1924 and the fishing communities were allowed to stay.

UWA is blunt about the consequence in its own management plan, listing as a weakness that the presence of fishing villages inside the park dilutes the wilderness experience. The villages generate local traffic, they put livestock alongside predators, and the retaliation that follows is in the record: the eleven lions poisoned near Hamukungu in April 2018 and the four poisoned in December 2025 were both attributed to livestock losses. Twenty per cent of park revenue goes to communities in the parishes bordering the park, which is the mechanism meant to balance the ledger.

None of this makes the park less worth visiting. It does make it a different product from a park with no roads and no residents, and visitors who know that in advance are not disappointed by it afterwards.

What the park is, on paper

The park was gazetted as Kazinga National Park in 1952 and renamed Queen Elizabeth National Park in 1954 after a visit by Queen Elizabeth II, with UWA's management plan dating the first gazettement to Legal Notice No. 159 of 1954. It is a UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve and an Important Bird Area, and the Lake George wetlands on the north shore, 250 square kilometres of them, have been on the Ramsar list since 1988.

The Queen Elizabeth Protected Area is larger than the national park. It also takes in Kyambura Wildlife Reserve and Kigezi Wildlife Reserve, both of which UWA's 2026 report lists as candidates for upgrading to national park status. The park borders Virunga National Park in DR Congo and animals cross between them. Ground runs from 910 metres at Lake Edward to 1,350 metres at the Katwe explosion craters, with 250 kilometres of lake shore inside the protected area.

Even the area is contested inside UWA's own documents. The park page says 1,978 square kilometres, and the management plan uses both 1,978 and 1,987 in different places. Visitor numbers are thinner still: the management plan, written around 2011, gives about 34,000 visitors a year excluding students, while UWA's last published annual report, covering July 2022 to June 2023, records 97,814 visitors here against a national total of 382,285 and 145,116 at Murchison Falls. No newer park-level figure has been published.

Oil in the Albertine Rift, in UWA's own words

There is no oil production inside Queen Elizabeth. Exploration reached the park, one well was drilled in June 2010 and found nothing commercially viable, and UWA's most recent national report names oil and gas infrastructure as an emerging threat in the Murchison Falls and Bugoma landscape rather than here. That is the answer, and most of the detail behind it was written down by UWA itself.

The management plan's petroleum chapter states that exploration in Uganda has been ongoing since 2000 within the Albertine Graben, that the graben overlaps several protected areas including this one, and that the Queen Elizabeth Protected Area falls under blocks 4A, 4B and 4C. Exploration began in the southern part of the park, block 4B, which contains the Ishasha sector where the tree-climbing lions are. Seismic studies in 2007 and 2008 indicated a possibility of hydrocarbons and four prospective drill sites were identified: Ngaji near Rwenshama, Nkobe near Katooke gate on the road to Ishasha, Mpundu at the park boundary at Kikarara, and Kiremu in Maramagambo forest. Drilling at Ngaji in June 2010 found no viable quantities. The plan's zoning chapter adds a line that puts the licensing in perspective: oil and gas activities were not zoned because all three blocks cover almost the entire national park.

UWA's own list of risks is unusually direct for an official document. It names land take for drill sites, camps, seismic surveys, drilling and road networks, habitat and niche destruction, increased human and vehicular traffic, noise from heavy machinery, altered animal behaviour and ranging, and pollution from hazardous wastes, and states that exploration is likely to have negative impacts on the integrity of the protected area as a refugium. It then puts the other side in the same chapter, that petroleum resources have great potential to cause national development and improve community livelihoods, and commits to monitoring rather than opposition: an oil field monitoring unit with its own staff and offices, water and air quality testing, a sensitivity atlas and baseline biodiversity studies.

Two pieces of provenance belong on the record. The plan was prepared with funds from the Oil for Development programme of the Government of Norway, under a project titled Strengthening the management of Oil and Gas Sector in Uganda, and its acknowledgements name the Commissioner of the Petroleum Exploration and Production Department among the contributors. And the plan expired in 2021 with no published replacement we can find, which means the most detailed official account of oil in this park is now fifteen years old. The current licence status of blocks 4A, 4B and 4C, and whether any drilling followed the infill seismic study the plan describes, is something we have not been able to establish. Our history page carries the longer version.

Sources

• UWA: Queen Elizabeth National Park
• UWA: Queen Elizabeth Protected Area General Management Plan 2011 to 2021 (PDF)
• UWA Queen Elizabeth park brochure (PDF)
• UWA: State of Wildlife Resources in Uganda 2026 (PDF)
• Ministry of Works and Transport, 14 August 2026: road monitoring in the southern region
• Ramboll third-party review of the Katunguru bridge, published by the Ministry of Works and Transport, April 2026 (PDF)