Western Area Peninsula National Park covers about 183 square kilometers of green hills wrapped around the back of Freetown, the same range that early sailors called the Lion Mountains. It is the westernmost stretch of semi-deciduous closed-canopy rainforest in Sierra Leone - a dense, humid, dripping world of tall trees that begins almost where the city's streets end. The forest is more than scenery. It pulls rain from the Atlantic air and feeds the streams and reservoirs that supply Freetown its water. A capital of more than a million people drinks, in a real sense, from these slopes.

The land was first set aside in 1916 as a forest reserve of nearly 17,700 hectares, demarcated by Charles Lane Poole, the colony's first Conservator of Forests and the founder of its forestry department. For most of a century it held that status; in 2012 the government formally elevated it to a national park. UNESCO has since accepted it onto its tentative list for World Heritage consideration, alongside Tiwai Island and the Gola Forest. BirdLife International ranks it an Important Bird Area for the many species it shelters, and the forest floor hides three kinds of duiker - small, secretive antelope - among a host of other creatures rarely seen by the people living just downhill.

The Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, founded by the Amarasekarans in 1995, sits within the park on land carved from this forest. It exists because of a grim trade: chimpanzees taken as infants and kept as pets, often abused, frequently abandoned when they grow too large and strong to handle. Tacugama takes in these orphaned and rescued animals and gives them a home, and as its enclosures fill, it has turned increasingly to teaching - more than 2,000 rural schoolchildren visit each year to learn why a wild chimpanzee belongs in the forest, not on a chain. In 2019, partly through that advocacy, Sierra Leone named the western chimpanzee its national animal. A single rescued infant has, over three decades, helped reshape how an entire country sees its closest living relatives.

The park's greatest threat is the city it serves. Even with protected status, the forest has been eaten away at the edges by deforestation - homes, farms, and charcoal-burning pushing uphill as Freetown's population swells, a pressure the civil war only worsened. Researchers have mapped the losses and proposed redrawing the boundaries to defend what remains. The stakes reach beyond chimpanzees and birds: strip the slopes of trees and the rains that once soaked into the soil instead come roaring down as floods and mudslides, as the deadly 2017 disaster on nearby Mount Sugar Loaf made horribly clear. Protecting this forest is not sentiment. For Freetown, it is a matter of water, of safety, and of survival.