Our Facilities

• Bird Watching
• Crocodile and hippo tours
• Estuary Fishing
• Explore the biggest estuary in the world
• View the highest vegetated dunes in Africa

• Cultural Tour
• Dolphin watching
• Eastern Shores Night drives
• Estuary fishing
• Explore the biggest estuarine in the world
• Fly fishing
• Game drives and watching
• Golf at Monzi
• Hippo watching on estuary
• Horse riding
• Picnic spots
• Shore Fishing – Rock and Surf
• All species of bony and cartilaginous fish (excluding great whites and ragged tooth sharks) may be caught – excluding shad and galjoen in closed seasons. Shore fishing is permitted throughout the marine reserves excluding the Sanctuary areas.
• Stargazing
• Sugar Cane Tours at Monzi
• Tennis at Monzi
• Traditional Zulu music making and dancing
• Traditional Zulu Story telling
• Turtle Hatching Tour
• Turtle Nesting Tours
• View highest vegetated dunes in Africa
• Visit Bats Cave at Mission rocks
• Visit Crocodile/Snake/Cycad Centre
• Visit Jolly Robino (stranded ship)
• Walking Trails
• Whale watching

Fossils

The western shores of Lake St Lucia are rich in ancient marine fossils. Reports indicate that this area started forming during the Cretaceous (Chalk period, approximately 140,000,000 years ago. There were two phases – the most recent formations were caused by dropping sea levels starting a mere 2,000,000 years ago to create the largest estuarine lake in the world. The present eco-system has been sculptured through a series of wet and dry periods, rising and falling of sea levels, river erosion and wind. The most recent of this was cyclone Demoina.

Sand dunes were formed over the last 25,000 years. Fossil deposits (huge ammonites (extinct animal related to the octopus), sharks teeth as big as a man’s hand and in situ fossilized coral reef shows that most of the Park was once covered by the sea.

These fossils can be seen at the western shores of the lake.

Cultural treasures

Exciting new archaeological excavations on the eastern shore of Lake St Lucia highlight the Greater St Lucia Wetland Park’s significance in providing vital scientific clues to theories of early human settlement off the coastline of southern Africa. It is thought that the eastern shores of the lake were one of the passages for the southward migration of Iron Age people from central Africa more than 2000 years ago.

Name History

St Lucia was first known as the River of the sand of Gold (the Tugela mouth) – a name given by the survivors of the Portuguese ship Saint Benedict in 1554. In 1575 the Tugela River was properly named and St Lucia received its current name. The name is very apt because St Lucia is acclaimed for its golden beeches, sun and sea. The 19th century saw extensive hunting for ivory, rhino horn and hippo. Fortunately the ecological significance were recognized and protected by declaring this area a nature reserve on the 27 April 1897. This reserved include the lake and some of the surrounding land.

Lake Sibaya

The largest fresh water lake in Southern Africa, Lake Sibaya has a surface area of 77 square kilometres and an average depth of 13 meters. The lake was previously connected to the sea and with the closure of the estuary; numerous marine invertebrates and vertebrates are found here. Because of this phenomenon, the lake is also host to several endemic fish species, fund nowhere else in the world.

Lake St Lucia

This Lake acts as a nursery and is a rich feeding ground for countless fish, prawns, crabs and other marine species, which generally spawn at sea. The lake is the centre feature of the GSLWP and is home to a diversity of life. Although it is one of the largest estuaries in Africa, the average dept is only one and a half meter. Massive vegetated dunes on the Eastern Shores surround it.

Coelacanth discovered in Greater St Lucia Wetland Park

The Greater St Lucia Wetland Park (GSLWP) can now add a living fossil to its record of marine species with the recent discovery of three living coelacanths in a submarine canyon of the coast near Sodwana Bay.

A group of divers, led by Pieter Venter discovered and photographed the coelacanths, during a mixed-gas deep dive to 104 meters off the coast. Dr Phil Heemstra of the JLB Smith Institute of Ichthyology in Grahamstown positively identified them.

The coelacanth is a fish thought to be extinct until a live specimen was caught in a trawler net in 1938 off the Chalumna River Mouth of the Eastern Cape. This specimen was identified by Miss Margery Courtenay-Latimer, Curator of the East London Museum and named Latimeria chalumnae by the late Professor JLB Smith of Rhodes University. The specimens found off the GSLWP appear to be of the Latimeria species.

This exciting discovery off Sodwana Bay is all the more important because it confirms, for the first time, a South African presence of this extremely rare fish in a formally protected area that was declared a World Heritage Site in December 1999.

Nesting Turtles

Leatherback and loggerhead breeding females spend up to 15 years at sea before coming to land to lay eggs (December to January). Males wait in the sea and mate with the females as soon as they return. A female may lay several batches of eggs in one season, digging a hole with its hind flippers and laying 100 to 120 eggs at a time.

Guided by instinct they return to the beach where they hatched a few decades before. The effort of heaving its huge shell on its chest causes it to gasp for breath – it looks pitiful as “tears” of protective mucous stream from its eye. After laying the eggs, it covers the hole, thrashes around so that the exact position of the nest can no longer be seen and heads back into the sea. Some 60 days later the young turtles struggle out of their shells, dig 40 cm to the surface (done co-operatively by synchronized hatchlings) and crawl +/- 60 meters down the beach to the sea. Survival rates are low – 1 in 500 will survive.

World Heritage Site

The Convention on Wetlands, signed in Ramsar, Iran, in 1971, is an intergovernmental treaty, which provides the framework for national action and international cooperation for the conservation and wise use of wetlands and their resources. There are presently 157 Contracting Parties to the Convention, with 1708 wetland sites, totalling 1,530,000 square kilometres, designated for inclusion in the Ramsar List of Wetlands of International Importance.