Tswalu Kalahari Reserve

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Tswalu Kalahari Reserve

South Africa's largest private game reserve.
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Tswalu Kalahari Reserve
3 luxury safari camps supporting regenerative conservation | Privately guided safaris in South Africa’s last great wilderness, the southern Kalahari.

05/09/2026

White-backed vultures are among the southern Kalahari's most reliable year-round sightings. They are also critically endangered. Misunderstood, underrated, and essential – nature's most efficient recyclers, processing animal carcasses so that nutrients return to the land. Without them, ecosystems falter in ways that are difficult to reverse.

The threats are well documented: poisoned carcasses, habitat loss, power line collisions, and even belief-based medicine. What makes vulture conservation particularly complex is the birds themselves – they cross borders freely, which means protection in one area counts for little if the next offers none.

It's why the concept of Vulture Safe Zones matters. Tswalu was the first in South Africa, designated on Vulture Awareness Day in 2019. The initiative has since spread – a collaborative, landscape-scale response to a crisis that demands exactly that.

Images by Marcus Westberg

03/09/2026

Award-winning conservation photojournalist Marcus Westberg has been returning to Tswalu every year since 2021. After six seasons behind the lens, he’s attuned to the landscapes and the light at different times of the day and the year.

He rarely goes out looking for something specific. Instead, he allows himself to be awed by whatever greets him, and tries to work out what it is about a scene that he particularly likes.

Take this giraffe encounter.

“I had the most wonderful giraffe encounter in the dunes late one afternoon, just around sunset – though it was overcast, so the light was very soft. A group of them were just standing there on the road, and it honestly looked like they were cuddling. We stayed with them until it got too dark to photograph.”

Read the latest interview with Marcus: https://tswalu.com/what-a-national-geographic-photographer-notices-after-six-seasons-at-tswalu/

Images by Marcus Westberg

31/08/2026

Spring comes to the southern Kalahari in a wave of flowering. Across Tswalu, the camel thorn, black thorn, candle pod and January bush are in bloom, scenting the air and drawing browsers and pollinators from giraffe reaching into the canopy to bees laden with pollen.

Using EarthRanger, the team is tracking exactly when each species flowers, a study known as phenology.

Read the latest issue of the Conservation Journal here: https://tswalu.com/spring-flowering-at-tswalu-the-kalaharis-thorn-trees-in-bloom/

29/08/2026

Tarkuni is Tswalu's sole-use private homestead, five suites, up to 10 guests, 118,000 hectares of the southern Kalahari to yourselves. In the latest blog on our website, we explore what life in camp actually looks like, beyond the game drives. Read the story: https://tswalu.com/life-at-tarkuni-inside-tswalus-private-homestead/

Images by Chris Joubert

26/08/2026

On World African Wild Dog Day, we need a conservation reality check.

Tswalu’s data on African wild dogs is perhaps among the most comprehensive recorded for a wild predator anywhere, and pups have been raised successfully across multiple seasons. The challenge is not survival but space.

When young dogs disperse – as they must – they need somewhere to go. Finding reserves capable of absorbing a wild dog pack is one of the many challenges of southern African conservation. Through the Endangered Wildlife Trust's metapopulation programme, Tswalu has contributed 19 individuals to reintroduction efforts across southern Africa, Mozambique, and Malawi since 2016.

The work now is ensuring there is enough wild space beyond Tswalu's 118,000 hectares for that success to continue. For an endangered species, this is a remarkable problem to have.

Images by Marcus Westberg.

23/08/2026

The white rhino is the largest land mammal in the southern Kalahari, a grazer built for open ground, moving through the landscape with a weight and unhurried authority that slow motion only begins to capture.

Reels by Chris Joubert

20/08/2026

Afternoons on the reserve are enjoyed at your pace. Your guide cuts the engine and lets the sounds of birds, insects and the breeze rippling through the grass do the rest. Golden light seems to linger longer here than anywhere else, as the silence and vastness of this place settle around you.

And then, as the Kalahari day winds down, something new is waiting.

Boscia, Tswalu's new fine dining restaurant under the creative direction of Luke Dale Roberts, is open. Named after the shepherd's tree, a species that survives the harshest conditions through a root system that descends deep into the earth, it is a dining experience with a deep-rooted sense of place – in its ingredients, its makers, and its stories.

Images Chris Joubert

16/08/2026

Meerkats at Tswalu are habituated to close human presence, which means unhurried time at eye level.

Images by Marcus Westberg

13/08/2026

Kalahari sunsets have a way of putting life into perspective.

Images by Marcus Westberg

10/08/2026

Black-maned lions, wonderfully adapted to the extreme conditions so characteristic of the Kalahari, once roamed freely, unhindered by fences.

Tswalu's conservation mission is to restore the Kalahari to itself, protecting vital habitat for big predators, including lions, to flourish. By safeguarding habitat, Tswalu forms part of a bigger, collaborative effort – one that gives lions room to thrive across a wider landscape.

Images by Marcus Westberg

Address

Farm Korranaberg 296, Van Zylsrus
Kuruman
8467

Telephone

+27537819331

Website

http://www.tswalu.com/

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