UNESCO flamingo lake in the Rift Valley — the quiet neighbour of Nakuru, with white pelicans and the bones of ancient humans
Lake Elementaita is a shallow soda lake in the Great Rift Valley between Nairobi and Nakuru, inscribed as part of the Kenya Lake System UNESCO World Heritage Site alongside lakes Nakuru, Bogoria, and Baringo. Smaller and less visited than Nakuru, Elementaita has an intimacy the larger lake lacks: the thousands of lesser flamingos that feed in its alkaline shallows can be watched from the shore in near-silence, and the white pelicans that breed on a small island are readily visible. The lake's western shore is bounded by the Soysambu Conservancy — the former Delamere family estate, now a wildl…
Lake Elementaita sits at the junction of several important geological and archaeological records. The Kariandusi prehistoric site at the lake's northern end, excavated by Louis Leakey in 1929, yielded Acheulean hand axes from a site occupied by early humans roughly 1.2 million years ago — one of the earliest documented human occupation sites in East Africa. The colonial land allocation system granted the Delamere family extensive holdings around the lake in the early 20th century; the 3rd Baron Delamere became the most powerful figure in settler Kenya and a central character in the Happy Vall…