Bwindi Impenetrable National Park
— — a forest the mountain gorillas kept.
Not only on a wall.
“Bwindi sits in the southwestern highlands of Uganda, on the edge of the Albertine Rift. The name in Runyakitara reads as impenetrable, and the forest earns it. The park covers about 331 square kilometres of dense Afromontane growth and shelters close to half of all the mountain gorillas left in the world. Visitors come for the trek and leave with little to say. The park has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1994. — from the studio
Bwindi Impenetrable 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.
Bwindi Impenetrable National Park covers about 331 square kilometres of Afromontane forest in southwestern Uganda, along the eastern edge of the Albertine Rift. The park rises between roughly 1,160 and 2,607 metres and spans the Kanungu, Kabale, and Kisoro districts. It was gazetted as a national park in 1991, after long existing as a forest reserve, and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1994. The forest is one of the oldest on the African continent, with a continuous record stretching back through the last ice age.
Bwindi is best known as the stronghold of the mountain gorilla. Recent surveys place the global mountain gorilla population at just over 1,000 individuals, of which close to half live in this forest; the remainder are in the Virunga Massif shared by Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The park is home to roughly twenty habituated gorilla groups available for tracking under permit. The forest also holds chimpanzees, l'Hoest's monkeys, forest elephants, and more than 350 bird species.
Gorilla tracking is the standing reason visitors come to Bwindi. The park is divided into four trekking sectors — Buhoma, Ruhija, Rushaga, and Nkuringo — each with its own habituated groups and trailheads. Permits are issued through the Uganda Wildlife Authority and were set at 800 US dollars per person for foreign non-residents at the time of the 2024 fee review. Treks are limited to small groups and a one-hour visit with the gorillas. The walks themselves can take from one to six hours, depending on where the group is feeding that morning.