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ABOUT US
Who We Are
The Gora Wilderness Foundation is a South African conservation organisation working to connect, conserve, restore and rewild one of southern Africa’s most remarkable landscapes.
Gora was born from a vision to reconnect fragmented landscapes and restore the ecological processes that once shaped this region — recognising that lasting conservation cannot be achieved within isolated reserves, but through collaboration across an entire living landscape.
Today, Gora brings together strategic land conservation, ecological restoration, rewilding, regenerative land management and science-based conservation, working alongside private landowners, communities, conservation organisations, government and strategic partners to build an increasingly connected wilderness landscape.
Through this collaborative approach, the Gora Wilderness Foundation seeks to create a resilient, connected and thriving landscape where wildlife can once again move across historic ranges, biodiversity can recover, and conservation can generate enduring ecological, social and economic value for both nature and people.
Our Vision
Partnering with people to create the Gora Wilderness Conservation Area, the Western Cape’s leading rewilded living landscape, where islands of biodiversity are connected through corridors along ancient elephant pathways from the Indian Ocean to the Little Karoo, and beyond.
Our Mission
To reconnect and restore fragmented landscapes across the Cape by expanding protected areas, re-establishing ecological corridors, reintroducing and recovering indigenous wildlife populations, and enabling people to become active custodians of a thriving natural capital economy in a living landscape through conservation partnerships, sustainable land stewardship, and community participation.
Our Inspiration
gora wilderness foundation
Rewilding
the lost Cape wilderness
Come and immerse yourself in the unique landscape that is the Gora Wilderness Reserve as you bear witness to a wilderness being reborn.
Unlike the northern wilderness areas of South Africa that survived through the colonial era without losing the quintessential fauna of Africa, much of the Cape had been so severely impacted that the area became almost entirely depleted of the native larger mammals that once thrived here in innumerable herds, flocks, prides and clans. With a local extinction of over 90% of herbivores and predators that inhabited the area, what remained was a Cape wilderness devoid of wildlife.
Join us as we reverse the clock while moving forward into a brave new world of rewilding Gora!
our unique location
Garden Route &
Little Karoo
Along the southernmost tip of Africa lies a land of striking contrast where lush coastal grasslands and forests along the Indian Ocean abruptly ends at a mountainous interface with an arid semi-desert landscape. From the southern shoreline a living Fynbos floral bouquet stretches northward across the coastal forelands towards the forest clad southern slopes of the Outeniqua Mountain, standing as a towering barrier between the verdant country to the south and the dry plains to the north. Here the Cape Floristic Region meets with the Albany-Pondoland-Tongaland Biodiversity Hotspot to form in a mosaic of diversity
North of the Outeniqua Mountains the Fynbos clad slopes fade into the dry plains of the Little Karoo, an area so botanically rich that it serves as the spectacular succulent stage for the globally recognised Succulent Karoo Biodiversity Hotspot.
Despite the arid appearance of the land, it is by no means desolate and in years gone by the expanses teemed with vast herds of plains game and the Acacia lined riverbeds served as the apparent veins for elephant dispersal across the wide valleys between the various mountain chains that characterises the Cape of South Africa.
The unique location of the Gora Wilderness Reserve, at the southernmost tip of Africa where temperate and subtropical climates meet to adorn the land in an equally unique array of floral communities, has allowed various endemic species to come into existence in the region that are only found in the southern and non-savanna regions of South Africa. These include the Cape grysbok, grey rhebok, springbok, bontebok, blesbok, black wildebeest, Cape mountain zebra and Rau quagga, all of which can be found within the Gora Wilderness Reserve.
Apart from the tremendous biodiversity that awaits the adventure seeker in the Gora Wilderness Reserve, visitors to the reserve can observe and experience history in the making as the unique Cape wilderness, once almost lost and forgotten, is being returned to herself. Come and experience the weaving of a living tapestry of a restoring ecosystem on a luxurious safari as individual reserves and core conservation areas are connected and enlarged via corridors. Your rewilding adventure awaits!