Maputo National Park declared a Unesco World Heritage Site

Mozambique has received global acclaim for setting aside the Maputo National Park as the country’s second World Heritage Site, further strengthening its commitment to conserving a large area of its southern coastline for future generations.

The decision was announced in Paris on 13 July 2025 at a meeting of the Unesco World Heritage Committee, which oversees the protection of natural and cultural heritage sites deemed to be of “outstanding universal value”.

The new 154,000ha Maputo heritage park forms an extension of South Africa’s 240,000ha iSimangaliso Wetland Park, enlarging the total area of this transboundary world heritage site to almost 400,000ha.

It was one of seven new global heritage sites confirmed at the 47th World Heritage Committee meeting in the French capital at the weekend.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has described this extended park as “one of the most outstanding coastal wetlands in Africa”, an area renowned for its scenic beaches, wildlife and wetland areas.

The park includes the former Maputo Elephant Reserve, Inhaca Island and the Machangulo Peninsula, and a stretch of ocean from Inhaca to Ponta do Ouro.

Since the inception of the World Heritage Convention in 1972, IUCN has been the official advisory body under the World Heritage Convention on natural World Heritage. 

While world heritage site status adds a further layer of protection for this unique area of land and sea, it remains unclear whether the governments of Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Botswana will now abandon their controversial plan to jointly develop a new deep-water harbour and coal export terminal near Ponta Techobanine.

Ponta Techobanine falls within the declared buffer zone of the heritage site. In its nomination papers, the Mozambican government declared that there were “currently no plans to pursue this (harbour) development”.

However, as recently as April, the African Development Bank approved a $3-million reimbursable grant to fund a comprehensive feasibility study for the proposed Techobanine harbour and an upgrade of railway infrastructure linking the three nations.

Since 4 July, the African Development Bank has neither acknowledged nor responded to a list of queries from Daily Maverick on its reasons for supporting a new harbour and 30,000ha industrial zone directly in the middle of the newly extended World Heritage Site.

Daily Maverick has now sent further questions to the bank’s Disclosure and Access to Information (DAI) unit, which was set up in 2013 to ensure public access to information on projects supported by the bank.

The bank says that its revised policy “is premised on the principle of maximum disclosure” of information and that its objective is to ensure that “most information will systematically be made public”. DM