Qualla: Western Area Peninsula National Park

Western Area Peninsula National Park: Introduction

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It started with a baby chimpanzee for sale by the side of a road. In the late 1980s, Bala Amarasekaran and his wife Sharmila were driving north of Freetown when they passed an infant chimp being offered up to passing cars. They paid thirty dollars for him. What they discovered - that the country was full of orphaned, captive chimpanzees, their mothers usually killed to take them - set in motion a sanctuary that now anchors one of the most important patches of forest in Sierra Leone.

Western Area Peninsula National Park: The Forest Above the City

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 de...

Western Area Peninsula National Park: A Century of Protection

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 e...

Western Area Peninsula National Park: Tacugama

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Western Area Peninsula National Park: A Forest Under Pressure

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...