Nairobi's public parks and urban forests

Map of 7 locations in Nairobi, Kenya

Nairobi's green space runs from lawns you can walk to from a downtown office to a thousand-hectare gazetted forest with waterfalls in it, and the two are governed by completely different bodies with different gates, fees and politics. This gathers the parks and forests that are actually open to the public, with what each one costs you to enter, who holds the keys, and what the ground does once you are inside.

Places in this collection

  • The August 7th Memorial Park — Built on the ground where the United States Embassy stood until the 1998 bombing, this is a commemorative site first and a park second, a p…
  • Oloolua Nature Trail — The walking route through Oloolua Forest on the Karen side of the city, managed by the Kenya Institute of Primate Research rather than by t…
  • Karura Forest — At 1,063 hectares this is the largest of the three gazetted forests within Nairobi, ahead of Ngong and Oloolua, and it carries a network of…
  • Nairobi Arboretum — Thirty hectares laid out in 1907 by E. Batiscombe as a trial ground for forestry species, now holding more than 350 kinds of tree and still…
  • Jeevanjee Gardens — A small square of green inside the central business district, created in the early twentieth century by the Asian industrialist A.M. Jeevan…
  • Central Park — Directly adjacent to Uhuru Park and renovated in the same Kenya Defence Forces programme, Central Park came out of roughly five years of cl…
  • Uhuru Park — Nairobi's best-known park sits immediately west of the central business district and spent years closed while the Kenya Defence Forces rebu…

Related collections