KENYA--The African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) is pleased to announce the opening of Satao Elerai, a luxury lodge set on 5,000 acres of communally conserved lands in southern Kenya. The lodge is owned by the Entonet/Elerai Maasai community, which planned and created the enterprise with strategic support from AWF. Southern Cross Safaris, a leading private company, will operate the lodge and the conservancy as a single high-quality, highly efficient enterprise.

The two facets of Satao Elerai are mutually reinforcing: revenues from the lodge are reinvested in further conserving wildlife and lifting community well-being; the conservancy, in turn, provides the basis for a high-quality tourism experience that is sure to attract new visitors year after year.

Like AWF’s other enterprise initiatives, Satao Elerai celebrates the unique lands and community that are its anchor. The lodge itself resembles a traditional Maasai boma, and is built almost entirely of dried, naturally felled yellow fever acacia trees—called “elerai” in the Maasai language. Many of the trees were collected from the lands now designated a conservancy, which elephants routinely cross as they move south from Amboseli National Park to the forests of Tanzania.

Besides these free-ranging elephants, the 5,000-acre conservancy gives refuge to lions, cheetah, buffalo, giraffes, serval cats, dikdik, gerenuk, and leopards. As the conservancy’s place in the larger landscape matures, new conservation initiatives will be designed and introduced for the benefit of people.

Satao Elerai is part of AWF's vast Kilimanjaro Heartland, a cross-boundary landscape at the center of the Kenya-Tanzania border. In this critical network of protected and unprotected landscapes, Satao Elerai broadens the area dedicated to conservation – a key to keeping wildlife habitats from fragmenting and to maintaining important wildlife corridors.

To learn more about Satao Elerai and to plan a visit, click here.

To view photographs of Satao Elerai, click here.