Photo: Travel Local · CC BY 2.0
Semuliki National Park
Hot springs, Congo Basin rainforest and birds found nowhere else in East Africa.
About
Semuliki is the eastern tip of the Congo's Ituri forest, reaching across the border into Bundibugyo District. It is Uganda's least visited national park and its strangest: boiling hot springs at Sempaya where guides cook eggs in the water, a bird list of over 400 species including dozens of Guinea-Congo specialists, and forest trails that end at the Semliki River looking across into the DRC.
Highlights
- Sempaya hot springs
- Kirumia forest trail
- Congo-basin birding
- Batwa community visits
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Stories from Semuliki National Park
Semuliki National Park
The Forest That Boils: Semuliki, Where the Congo Slips Quietly Into Uganda
The steam finds you before the path does. You are walking through lowland forest west of Fort Portal, listening to the metallic clatter of a piping hornbill somewhere above the canopy, and then the air changes — thickens, sweetens faintly with sulphur — and through a screen of raffia palms a white column rises two metres into the morning and drifts sideways into the trees. This is Nyasimbi, the female spring at Sempaya, and she has been boiling for as long as anyone in Bundibugyo can remember. Guides carry eggs in their pockets for the demonstration. Ten minutes in a woven basket lowered into the water, and breakfast is ready. The water runs at around 100 degrees Celsius. Nobody puts a hand in twice.
Torch Media Africa · 19 Sept 2026 · 5 min read
Semuliki National Park
Into the Rift: Semuliki's Steaming Springs and Forgotten Forest
The steam is visible long before the springs are. It rises in a slow grey column above the forest canopy near Sempaya, thick enough on cool mornings to be mistaken for smoke, and it has been doing so for as long as the Bakonzo and Batwa communities who live at the edge of this forest can remember. The Bamboga people call the larger of the two hot springs Nyasimbi — "the female ancestors" — a geyser that spits boiling water and vapor as high as two meters into the air at a scalding 103 degrees Celsius. A short walk away sits its counterpart, Bintente, the "male" spring, a wide, steaming pool twelve meters across set in a swampy clearing ringed by raffia palms. Local guides still boil eggs and bananas in its waters for visitors who want proof, beyond the smell of sulfur, that the ground itself is alive here.
Torch Media Africa · 19 Sept 2026 · 4 min read
Semuliki National Park
Where the Forest Still Boils: Uganda's Last Congo Basin Frontier
The road out of Fort Portal climbs before it falls. It threads the lower slopes of the Rwenzori Mountains, past tea estates gone the deep green of wet slate, before dropping fifty-two winding kilometers toward a valley that does not behave like the rest of Uganda. Here, at the western edge of the country where the Albertine Rift splits open, the savannah gives way without warning to lowland rainforest — the easternmost fingertip of the vast Ituri forest that spills out of the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is Semuliki National Park, and it has spent three decades as one of Africa's quietest superlatives: 220 square kilometers holding nearly two-thirds of Uganda's forest bird species, a hot spring that boils eggs in minutes, and a corner of the continent that feels, unmistakably, like it belongs to a different country than the one on the map.
Torch Media Africa · 19 Sept 2026 · 4 min read