Arusha Region, Tanzania — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Arusha Region known for?

Ngorongoro carries the region's reputation. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area, listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, draws the greater share of travellers who pass through Arusha Region, and the city of Arusha handles most of the arrivals, briefings and departures that surround it. Kenya lies over the northern boundary.

Safari operators, guides and outfitters cluster in the regional capital rather than out at the conservation area itself.

Where is Arusha Region?

Six neighbours ring Arusha Region. Kajiado County and Narok County, both across the international border in Kenya, close the region off to the north, while the Kilimanjaro Region takes the eastern flank and the Manyara and Singida Regions carry the boundary round to the south. West of that line lie the Mara and Simiyu regions.

Only the northern boundary is an international one. Tanzania counts 31 administrative regions, and this is one of them, sharing its name with its capital city. The whole of it sits inside the tropics, south of the equator.

Arusha, both the regional capital and the largest city, anchors the settled side of that frame. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area falls within these borders, and its UNESCO World Heritage listing puts an internationally recognised protected landscape at the heart of what the region is known for. Its ground covers about as much as the land and water of Maryland put together.

Scale is the point. Everything the region is known for, and most of what it is administered for, is set inside that outline: the conservation area on one hand, the regional capital and its surrounding country on the other.

What is Arusha Region like?

Swahili does the daily work here. It is the language of the market, the bus stand and the office in Arusha, and it carries across the regional boundaries into the Kilimanjaro Region and the rest of Tanzania without a break. Across the northern boundary, in Kajiado County and Narok County, the same language crosses into Kenya.

Arusha itself is the region's cultural clearing house, the place where guides, traders and officials from every corner of the region actually meet. The city's calendar turns on arrivals and departures for the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and on the ordinary business of a regional capital serving districts far beyond that boundary. Ngorongoro changes the terms.

A World Heritage listing is an agreement about how a landscape may be used, and Ngorongoro's puts conservation permanently into the region's public life rather than leaving it to a seasonal industry. That shows in who works here. Guiding, hospitality and the administration of protected land account for a great deal of the working life that passes through the regional capital of Arusha.

Both sides of that economy meet in Arusha.

What is the history of Arusha Region?

Administrative history shapes this region more than any single monument does. Arusha Region stands as one of the 31 units into which Tanzania divides itself, holding within one boundary the city of Arusha, the frontier with Kenya's Kajiado County and Narok County, and the ground of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. That structure still holds.

Ngorongoro's inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage Site added an international layer of protection to land already inside a Tanzanian region.

What is the climate of Arusha Region?

South of the equator, the year here does not run on northern terms. Tropical position, not distance from any sea, sets the basic pattern across Arusha Region, so the swing that matters is between wet and dry spells rather than between a warm season and a cold one. Names of months mislead.

A traveller arriving from Kenya in the north crosses no climatic border at all, since the same tropical belt runs on through Kajiado County and Narok County without regard to the line on the map.

How do you get to Arusha Region?

Arusha is the arrival point. Movement into the region converges on the regional capital, whether it runs in from the Mara and Simiyu regions on the western side, across from the Kilimanjaro Region in the east, or up from the Manyara and Singida Regions to the south. Kenya sits over the northern line.

Kajiado County and Narok County face the region across that border, and travel onward to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area is organised out of Arusha rather than from any point on the frontier itself.