Serengeti National Park
— — a plain wide enough to hold a million animals walking.
Not only on a wall.
“Fourteen thousand seven hundred and fifty square kilometres of open grass and acacia in northern Tanzania, stitched to the Maasai Mara across the Kenyan border to form one of the largest intact ecosystems on the continent. Every year about 1.5 million wildebeest and 250,000 zebra walk a clockwise circuit through it, following the rains. Flat-topped acacias, granite kopjes the lions prefer, and a horizon line broken only by dust. — from the studio
Serengeti National Park, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Serengeti National Park covers about 14,750 square kilometres of northern Tanzania, in the Mara, Simiyu, and Arusha regions, bordered on the north by Kenya's Maasai Mara National Reserve and on the southeast by the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. It was gazetted in 1951 and inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1981 for its near-intact savanna ecosystem. The name comes from the Maasai word Siringet, meaning the place where the land runs on forever. Elevations across the park range from about 920 to 1,850 metres, and the dominant landscape is open grassland on volcanic ash soils.
The Serengeti's defining event is the Great Migration. Each year roughly 1.5 million wildebeest, 250,000 zebra, and several hundred thousand Thomson's gazelle move in a clockwise loop through the wider ecosystem, following the rains and the new grass. Calving happens on the short-grass plains of the southern Serengeti in late January and February. The herds drift north and west through the central park from May, cross the crocodile-heavy Mara River into Kenya from July through September, and return south on the eastern flank through November and December. The cycle has been observed without interruption since systematic ecological study began in the 1960s.
Most visits route through Kilimanjaro International Airport at Arusha or fly directly into Seronera Airstrip in the central park. The park is open year-round; June through October is the long dry season and the conventional game-viewing window, while late January and February draw visitors for the calving on the southern plains. Vehicle access is by guided 4x4 only; off-road driving is restricted to protect the grassland. The Serengeti is managed by TANAPA and forms one half of the wider Serengeti-Mara ecosystem with the Kenyan reserve to the north and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area to the southeast.