Gateway to the Omo Valley tribes and Ethiopia's most biodiverse lake park — hippos, crocodiles, Nile tilapia, and highland banana gardens
Arba Minch (meaning 'Forty Springs' in Amharic — for the 40 springs that flow from the Guge mountain cliffs into Lake Abaya) is the regional capital of the Gamo Gofa zone in southern Ethiopia, 500km from Addis Ababa. The town sits on a ridge between two large lakes — Lake Abaya (deep brown from clay sediment, the largest lake in the Ethiopian Rift Valley) and Lake Chamo (smaller, clearer, famous for its Nile crocodile population and hippo pods). Nechisar National Park occupies the land between the two lakes — a grass-covered plateau (nech sar means 'white grass' in Amharic) with zebra, Grant'…
The Gamo Gofa region has been inhabited continuously since the early Iron Age; the highland communities developed intensive terraced agriculture on the Guge and Gamo escarpments that makes them among the most productive agricultural landscapes in Ethiopia. The Dorze people maintained a warrior culture that resisted Menelik II's late-19th-century centralisation of Ethiopia; the integration of the southern peoples into the Ethiopian state took longer and was more contested than the northern provinces. Nechisar National Park was created in 1974 but has had a difficult history — the Guji Oromo an…