Salonga National Park

Salonga National Park, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, protects roughly 36,000 square kilometers of the Congo Basin rainforest, making it Africa's largest tropical rainforest reserve, and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984 for safeguarding a large expanse of largely intact forest and the rare species it supports. Reachable mainly by river, with almost no roads crossing it, the park shelters bonobos, forest elephants, leopards, bongo antelope and the Congo peafowl, the country's national bird, among hundreds of other bird and fish species. Poaching and civil conflict placed Salonga on the List of World Heritage in Danger from 1999 to 2021, and it was removed from that list in 2021 after conservation conditions improved.