Most of Africa’s great safari regions are not single parks. They are mosaics — a national park beside a dozen private reserves beside community land — and remarkably few of them have ever been drawn as a whole. These are our attempt to fix that, one region at a time.
Every map is drawn from scratch in QGIS, to a single scale, with every reserve we can source a boundary for. They are free to use — on a website, in print, in a presentation — as long as you credit 25° South and link back. You do not need to ask us first.
Reserve maps
Protected-area reference maps: boundaries, roads, rivers and towns, with a full list of every reserve shown. Other kinds of map — camps, road and access networks — may follow.
Single reserves, in detail
Where a reserve is large or self-contained enough to be a destination on its own, a larger-scale sheet is more use than a regional one: gates, camps, waterholes, airstrips and the internal road network.
Using these maps
Free to use with attribution and a link back — that is the whole licence (CC BY 4.0). Print them, put them on a website, drop them in a presentation or a guidebook. No permission needed, no fee, no form to fill in. If you are able to link to the map’s own page rather than to the image file, please do: it means a corrected edition reaches your readers instead of a stale one.
Credit line — copy and paste
Plain text
Map by 25° South (25-south.com), CC BY 4.0
HTML
Map by <a href=”https://25-south.com/destinations/maps/”>25° South</a>, CC BY 4.0
How they are made
Boundaries, roads, rivers and settlements come from OpenStreetMap and are used under the ODbL. Each map is drawn in QGIS and projected to the correct UTM zone for its region, so distances and the scale bar are accurate rather than approximate. Where operators or provincial authorities publish their own area figures, we cross-check the mapped boundary against them and flag anything that disagrees on the map’s own page.
Two things we do not do. We do not draw a boundary we cannot source — a reserve is either mapped from real data or left off, never sketched in from a tourist brochure. And we do not plot private lodges and camps on a regional reference map: they change far faster than boundaries do, and a lodge map is out of date the month it is printed. The single-reserve sheets are the exception, and they carry a date for that reason.
Each map’s own page carries the detail specific to it — what was included, what was deliberately left out, and any figure we could not reconcile.
What is coming
More regions are in progress — the Namib and Sossusvlei, and the Maasai Mara conservancies among them. If there is a region you would find useful, tell us; it is a reasonable way to decide what to draw next.
Corrections
Reserve boundaries change, reserves merge and drop fences, and open data has gaps. If something on one of these maps is wrong — a boundary, a name, an area — please tell us and we will correct it and reissue the map. Corrections are welcome from anyone; you do not need to be connected to the reserve.