Gola lies within the Upper Guinean Forest, a biodiversity hotspot stretching from Guinea to Togo that once covered much of coastal West Africa. Today, that forest is fragmented and diminished, reduced to scattered blocks across multiple countries. The Greater Gola Landscape, which extends across the border into Liberia, constitutes the third largest remaining block in the entire Upper Guinean system. The park itself amalgamates three former forest reserves -- Gola North, Gola East, and Gola West -- that were declared a national park by President Ernest Bai Koroma and enacted by the Parliament of Sierra Leone in December 2010. It was officially opened in a ceremony in December 2011, becoming Sierra Leone's second national park.

The biodiversity surveys read like an inventory of improbability. More than 330 bird species have been recorded, 14 of them globally threatened. Over 650 species of butterfly inhabit the forest -- roughly 80 percent of all species known from Sierra Leone, concentrated in a single landscape. Among 49 mammal species, the standouts are extraordinary: a population of more than 300 western chimpanzees, making Gola one of the species' strongholds in West Africa; pygmy hippopotamuses, the smaller and far rarer relative of the common hippo, slipping through waterways at dusk; and a dwindling population of African forest elephants, ghosts moving through a canopy so dense that researchers track them by their dung and their footprints rather than by sight.

The forest nearly did not survive to earn its protections. Between the 1960s and 1980s, commercial logging cleared more than 20,000 hectares. Mining interests -- diamonds and iron ore -- added further pressure, carving into the forest from multiple directions. Then came Sierra Leone's civil war, from 1991 to 2002, which disrupted conservation efforts and exposed the forest to poaching and encroachment. A Global Witness report documented the ongoing threats from resource extraction. That the forest endured at all owes much to a conservation partnership launched in the 1990s between the Government of Sierra Leone, the Conservation Society of Sierra Leone, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds -- an unlikely alliance of a war-torn government, a local NGO, and a British charity, united by the conviction that what remained was worth fighting to keep.

Forests do not recognize national boundaries, and the Gola ecosystem sprawls across the Sierra Leone-Liberia border. On the Liberian side, the Gola Forest Community shares similar cultures, peoples, and species with its Sierra Leonean counterpart. A proposed Lofa-Mano National Park in northeastern Liberia would adjoin Gola, potentially creating a transboundary protected area large enough to sustain viable populations of its most vulnerable species. The 2025 UNESCO inscription -- recognizing the Gola-Tiwai Complex at the 47th Session of the World Heritage Committee -- acknowledged not just a park but a landscape, one where the survival of chimpanzees and forest elephants depends on cooperation between two nations and dozens of forest-edge communities whose livelihoods are woven into the same canopy.