Gombe National Park

In 1960, Jane Goodall was sent to Gombe National Park (then called Gombe Stream Game Reserve) to research an unstudied wild group of chimpanzees. Despite Goodall's world-famous work, Gombe only receives about 2,000 visitors per year and has no more than 15 to 25 visitors at any given time due to its remote location. There are no roads to the park, and the only way to visit is to take a two-hour boat ride to the Gombe Stream Research Center. 

Gombe National Park is located in Northwestern Tanzania on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Across the lake, mountain ranges of both Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo are visible on clear weather days. The park features high mountains of rainforest rising up from the lakeshore.

Gombe is a functioning research center that continues to study chimpanzees, baboons, and other wildlife residing within the park. As a 60-plus year ongoing study, Gombe has collected long-term research information about not only the chimpanzees and other wildlife but also climate change patterns, habitat loss outside of the park's borders, and infectious diseases that can spread from humans to chimps.

Two communities of chimpanzees live within the park, the Kasekela chimps and Mitumba chimps. The research approach to the chimpanzees involves as little human interference as possible, so researchers watch them from a distance and only intervene for serious medical issues.

The Gombe Stream Research Center is also home to a herbarium of local plant samples, a research lab and postmortem lab, and a bone room containing the skeletal remains of many of Gombe's most well known chimpanzees.