It is billed as nature’s greatest show: each year, two million wildebeest, zebra and antelope sweep through east Africa’s famed reserves in the Great Migration.
But conservationists are now fighting to stop the opening of a luxury lodge designed to provide a “front-row” view of a river crossing on the route, warning that it will disrupt the animals’ journey.
The $3,500-a-night Ritz-Carlton Masai Mara offers 20 tented suites with private plunge pools, personal butlers and expansive decks at one of the most dramatic points on a key migration corridor between Kenya’s Masai Mara and Serengeti national park in Tanzania.
Hordes of wildebeest migrate from the southern Serengeti to the high grass plains of the Masai Mara each year
KRISTIAN SEKULIC/GETTY IMAGES
The lodge, boasting a spa, gym and presidential suite, was due to open on Friday, but its location is the focus of a last-minute legal challenge by the conservationists who claim it will obstruct the path the herds have used for millennia. Court papers filed on Tuesday questioned whether an appropriate environmental impact assessment had been conducted for the development on the Sand River, an important water source for wildlife which snakes back and forth across the border between Kenya and Tanzania.
Meitamei Olol Dapash of the Institute for Masai Education, Research and Conservation, which brought the case, said that the Ritz-Carlton lodge was only the latest lucrative tourism project that officials had approved at the expense of wildlife and communities.
“Without the county government regulating the tourist behaviours, the tourist activities, we saw the habitat, the environment degraded so badly,” said Dapash, who founded the institute in 1997 as a grassroots network of Masai leaders. He has asked the environment and land court in Narok to suspend the lodge’s opening and hear the case against the Ritz-Carlton and its owner Marriott, the project’s local developer Lazizi Mara Ltd and the Kenyan authorities.
Kenya has made the Great Migration a centrepiece of its campaign to draw five million foreign visitors a year by 2027. Revenue from incoming tourists rose 15 per cent last year to $3.5 billion, driven by a post-pandemic surge in “bucket list” travel.
The lodge was due to open on Friday
RITZ-CARLTON
However, conservationists warn that new developments are narrowing the space available for wildlife and carving up routes used by the animals to find seasonal grazing land and water.
The migration has been regarded as an expression of the “circle of life”. Wildebeest herds follow the seasonal rains along a 500-mile route to and from the southern Serengeti, where their calves are born, to the high grass plains of the Masai Mara, quickly followed by zebra and antelope.
The migration is not without risk: predators like lions and hyenas are constantly hunting the animals, and herds hurl themselves into the crocodile-filled waters when crossing rivers.
Officials have acknowledged that over-tourism is taking a toll on the Masai Mara’s environment. Crowds of visitors, both on foot and in vehicles, are often seen clustering on both the Kenyan and Tanzanian sides of the river crossings to see the most dramatic encounters.
Tourists at Serengeti national park
NICK KLEER
Joseph Ogutu, a Kenyan researcher at the University of Hohenheim in Germany who has studied wildlife migration in Masai Mara, said the new lodge threatened local fauna. Many species’ populations in the reserve have shrunk by more than 80 per cent since the 1970s, according to government data.
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“It is highly ill advised to build a lodge on one of the most critical paths of the Great Migration,” Ogutu said.
Grant Hopcraft, an ecologist at the University of Glasgow, also said the project would probably have “large and long-term ecological implications for the migration”. Neither academic is part of the legal action.
Marriott said it respected the environment and that Lazizi had obtained all necessary approvals for development.
Lazizi’s managing director, Shivan Patel, said Kenyan officials conducted an environmental impact assessment, which established that the site was not a wildlife crossing point.
The Narok county government and the National Environment Management Authority, which are also named as respondents in the lawsuit, have not yet commented.