The new luxury lodge on the Masai Mara game reserve is designed to watch the Great Migration — but will actually disrupt it, a lawsuit claims.
It is billed as nature’s greatest show: each year, two million wildebeest, zebra and antelope sweep through east Africa’s famed reserves in the Great Migration.
But conservationists are now fighting to stop the opening of a luxury lodge designed to provide a “front-row” view of a river crossing on the route, warning that it will disrupt the animals’ journey.
The $3,500-a-night Ritz-Carlton Masai Mara offers 20 tented suites with private plunge pools, personal butlers and expansive decks at one of the most dramatic points on a key migration corridor between Kenya’s Masai Mara and Serengeti national park in Tanzania.
The lodge, boasting a spa, gym and presidential suite, was due to open on Friday, but its location is the focus of a last-minute legal challenge by the conservationists who claim it will obstruct the path the herds have used for millennia. Court papers filed on Tuesday questioned whether an appropriate environmental impact assessment had been conducted for the development on the Sand River, an important water source for wildlife which snakes back and forth across the border between Kenya and Tanzania.
Meitamei Olol Dapash of the Institute for Masai Education, Research and Conservation, which brought the case, said that the Ritz-Carlton lodge was only the latest lucrative tourism project that officials had approved at the expense of wildlife and communities.
“Without the county government regulating the tourist behaviours, the tourist activities, we saw the habitat, the environment degraded so badly,” said Dapash, who founded the institute in 1997 as a grassroots network of Masai leaders. He has asked the environment and land court in Narok to suspend the lodge’s opening and hear the case against the Ritz-Carlton and its owner Marriott, the project’s local developer Lazizi Mara Ltd and the Kenyan authorities.
Kenya has made the Great Migration a centrepiece of its campaign to draw five million foreign visitors a year by 2027. Revenue from incoming tourists rose 15 per cent last year to $3.5 billion, driven by a post-pandemic surge in “bucket list” travel.
