Tsodilo Hills

UNESCO calls Tsodilo the Louvre of the Desert: over 4,500 paintings preserved in only 10 square kilometers of Kalahari bush, one of the highest concentrations of rock art anywhere. The hills themselves are named in the landscape's own grammar, Male Hill, Female Hill, and Child Hill, and the Botswana Tourism Organisation describes the place the way the communities who live there do: a sacred, mystical place where the ancestral spirits of the San, the original inhabitants, and the Hambukushu, present for the past two centuries, dwell. Rituals for rain and assistance were performed here, and many of the paintings' remote and hard-to-reach locations are thought to be tied to their religious significance.

The archaeological record runs deep: UNESCO's listing credits Tsodilo with a chronological account of human activity over at least 100,000 years, and excavations have documented the Early Iron Age site of Divuyu (AD 700 to 900) with Bantu cattle-farming communities trading copper from the Congo and shells from the Atlantic. The best known paintings include the rhino polychromes and the Eland panel on a soaring cliff. Visits today go through village guides, mostly San and Hambukushu, arranged at the site, with marked trails like the Rhino Trail and Lion Trail, a small site museum, and campsites; the guide requirement keeps interpretation in community hands and fees flowing to local people.

Visiting

The UNESCO listing and the Botswana Tourism Organisation cover the practicalities: access typically from Shakawe or Maun by 4WD; guides are arranged at the site and are the operating norm; marked trails, a small museum, and campsites are on site. Current fees are not verifiable online and are not invented here.

Photo: [CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tsodilo_Hills_rock_paintings1.jpg)