Matobo Hills

Matobo Hills lie about 35 kilometers south of Bulawayo in southern Zimbabwe, a granite landscape built from the ancient Matopos Batholith over more than 2 billion years and eroded into smooth rounded whaleback domes called dwalas and broken kopjes strewn with boulders. The hills cover roughly 3,100 square kilometers, of which Matobo National Park, Zimbabwe's oldest national park, established in 1926, protects 424 square kilometers, with the remainder held as communal land and commercial farmland. The outcrops shelter more than 3,000 registered rock art sites made by San peoples, some dating back around 300,000 years, and support unusually high densities of black eagles and leopards; the whole landscape was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003 for both its geology and its human history. This entity documents Matobo Hills specifically as a geological formation, a granite batholith landscape eroded into whaleback domes and kopjes.