Makgadikgadi & Nxai Pans: A Landscape the Size of Portugal

The Makgadikgadi Pans cover roughly 12,000 square kilometres of the Kalahari Basin — an area comparable in size to Portugal — and rank among the largest salt pan systems on Earth. For most of the dry season, it's one of the starkest landscapes imaginable: flat, cracked, white earth running to a horizon that seems to bend with the curvature of the planet.

Two very different seasons

What makes Makgadikgadi remarkable is how completely it transforms. In the dry months, it's a place of silence and heat-shimmer emptiness — quad bikes and specialist pan tours are the way to experience it. Come the rains, though, and the pans flood into shallow wetlands, drawing one of Southern Africa's great wildlife migrations: zebra by the tens of thousands, followed by their predators.

Nxai Pan

Adjoining Makgadikgadi to the north, Nxai Pan is smaller but reliably good for game viewing, particularly in the green season when zebra and wildebeest concentrate around its waterholes. It's also home to Baines' Baobabs, a small grove of ancient baobab trees painted by explorer Thomas Baines in 1862 and still standing largely unchanged.

Visiting

Most visitors base themselves at nearby lodges and take guided pan excursions — the terrain is deceptively easy to get disoriented in, and local guides know exactly where the firmer ground and the wildlife both are.