South Africa's National Parks in the Order They Were Founded, From Addo in 1931 to the Garden Route in 2009

Addo was set up in 1931 to save a local elephant herd that had been cut to about 16 animals by 1920. It now protects over 600 elephants at about 1,640 square kilometers and has grown to hold marine and coastal sections, including the world's largest breeding colony of Cape gannets. Start here as the model of a park created to rescue one species.

Also founded in 1931, Bontebok protects an antelope endemic to the Cape region that had been reduced nearly to extinction. At about 28 square kilometers it is the smallest of South Africa's national parks, and it sits within the Cape Floristic Region, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Compare its scale with Addo, founded the same year.

This park began as the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park in 1931 and was joined with Botswana's Gemsbok National Park in an agreement of 2000. Roughly 38,000 square kilometers, about three quarters of it in Botswana, it lets wildlife cross the border freely along the Nossob and Auob riverbeds. It shows how a 1931 park became a shared international one.

Established in July 1937, Mountain Zebra began with just five stallions and one mare of the Cape mountain zebra, then threatened with extinction. Land purchases have grown it to about 284 square kilometers, and it now supports more than 700 mountain zebras. It is the third of the rescue parks on this path.

Founded in 1963 near the Lesotho border, Golden Gate is valued for scenery more than wildlife: golden, ochre and orange sandstone cliffs, with the Brandwag rock formation and San rock paintings in shelters. It is the Free State's only national park, and its fossil finds include the oldest known dinosaur embryos, those of Massospondylus.

Proclaimed in 1966, Augrabies protects the roughly 60 meter fall of the Orange River in the Northern Cape. Below it the river has cut an 18 kilometer granite gorge that averages 240 meters deep, in a dry landscape of quiver trees, springbok and gemsbok. Here a park is made around a single waterfall rather than an animal.

Karoo National Park was established in 1979 near Beaufort West and covers about 768 square kilometers of semi-desert. The Nuweveld part of the Great Escarpment divides it into lower plains and an upper plateau, and it holds five tortoise species, the most of any park in the world.

Founded in 1985 about 88 kilometers north of Cape Town, this park of about 363 square kilometers is built around Langebaan Lagoon, a Ramsar wetland that hosts migratory Palearctic birds. Its islands hold breeding African penguins and Cape gannets, and its Postberg section is known for spring wildflowers from August to September.

Marakele dates from 1994 and covers about 670 square kilometers of the Waterberg massif in Limpopo, inside the Waterberg Biosphere. It holds the largest colony of Cape vultures in the world, around 800 breeding pairs, and became a park with all of the big five after buffalo were reintroduced in 2013.

Established on 14 September 1998, Agulhas is one of the smallest parks and runs along the coast between Gansbaai and Struisbaai. Its landmark is Cape Agulhas, the southernmost point of Africa and the notional meeting place of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and it protects fynbos with around 2,000 native plant species and historic shipwrecks.

Namaqua, set up in 2001 on the Atlantic coast of the Northern Cape, covers about 1,368 square kilometers of the Succulent Karoo, a biodiversity hotspot with the largest concentration of succulent plants in the world. Over 1,000 of its roughly 4,000 plant species grow nowhere else, and its August and September wildflowers are its draw.

Camdeboo became a national park on 30 October 2005, building on a Karoo reserve begun in 1983 on land donated by the World Wide Fund for Nature. It nearly surrounds the town of Graaff-Reinet and is best known for the Valley of Desolation, a group of towering dolerite pillars.

The newest stop was created on 6 March 2009 by merging several existing protected areas into one park of about 1,210 square kilometers, with around 605 square kilometers of indigenous forest. It is split mainly between its Tsitsikamma and Wilderness sections and is known for the Otter Trail hiking route, which closes the path with a park assembled from older ones.