Greg Carr says Gorongosa is a “human development and conservation project”. PHOTO: BBC

What does it take to restore a wildlife hotspot? To put some animals back in, develop and sustain the environment so more animals return, and hold up the model as a means to uplift communities, and thereby the nation? The answer is Gorongosa National Park – a Mozambican safari paradise.

In 1962, six-year-old Vasco Galante was treated to his first cinema trip – to see Charlton Heston in the Hollywood epic, The Ten Commandments. But despite the blockbuster’s eye-popping sequences, the images that most impressed young Vasco came from a short advert shown before the film, which showcased the elephants, lions and buffalo in the verdant floodplains of Gorongosa National Park – a Mozambican safari paradise once marketed as “the place where Noah left his Ark”.

As he left the Lisbon picture house, young Vasco vowed to visit the park one day, and more than 40 years later, he finally got the chance. But the park he encountered was a far cry from the Gorongosa of ’60s showreels that once attracted the likes of John Wayne, Joan Crawford and Gregory Peck. A brutal 15-year civil war in the aftermath of Mozambique’s independence from Portugal in 1975 had devastated much of the province, and Gorongosa, one of its key battle grounds, was almost destroyed.

During the war, rebel forces from the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo), made the foothills of Mount Gorongosa their home, and through a combination of hunting and environmental vandalism, managed to annihilate 90% of the large animal population. Local poaching compounded the problem, and by the time Vasco arrived in 2005, “you could drive all day long and not encounter any wildlife,” he says. Chitengo, the park’s main campsite, had been reduced to rubble.

Gorongosa’s predicament was in many ways indicative of the state of Mozambique’s tourist industry, which had once been a significant part of the country’s economy.

Despite more than 2,700 kilometres of coral-fringed coastline, abundant natural beauty, rich cultural heritage, and its proximity to South Africa, one of the world’s top tourist destinations, Mozambique was making far less money from international visitors than neighbours such as Zimbabwe and Zambia.

Years of armed conflict scared off holidaymakers, and vital infrastructure such as cross-country roads and train lines had been all-but destroyed.

Labyrinthine visa processes and the relative paucity of tour operators certainly didn’t help matters, but most importantly, investment in tourism was desperately low.

Today, Vasco is the communications director of a newly restored Gorongosa, which is once again making a name for itself as a premier safari destination, while acting as a model for many of Mozambique’s long-neglected attractions.

The restoration project, which began in 1994 with the help of the African Development Bank, is spearheaded by 56-year-old Greg Carr, an ebullient tech entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist from Idaho Falls in the US who made his fortune at an early age, and was looking for a venture to which, as he puts it, he could devote the rest of his life.

Mr Carr visited Mozambique in 2004, at the invitation of the country’s ambassador to New York, at a time when the country was “the single poorest nation on earth,” he says.

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