Kakum National Park Canopy Walkway: Everything You Need to Know
Walk 350 metres through the treetops of Kakum National Park, home of Ghana's famous canopy walkway, forest elephants and 266 bird species. How to visit from Accra.
Seven rope-and-plank bridges strung between the crowns of giant trees turn a walk in the woods into a proper adventure. Kakum is one of only three places in Africa with a canopy walkway — and the easiest by far to reach.
By Peter Mensah · October 12, 2026 · 5 min read
Some forests you look at. Kakum National Park, in the coastal forests of Ghana's Central Region, is a forest you climb into. Covering 375 square kilometres of thick tropical rainforest a few hours north of Accra, the park is best known for one extraordinary idea: a walkway that lifts you off the ground and into the treetops, where the real life of the forest happens.
Below you, the canopy floor is a living ceiling: Diana monkeys leaping between branches, grey parrots rolling past, and somewhere in the green, forest elephants moving as quietly as only elephants can. Above you, there is nothing but sky and the swaying crowns of trees that have stood for centuries.
The walkway: 350 metres in the sky
Kakum's canopy walkway runs for 350 metres, connecting seven tree tops in a suspended chain of rope bridges and platforms. It is one of only three locations in Africa with a canopy walkway, a fact that turned a quiet national park into one of West Africa's signature ecotourism experiences.
The structure is simple and brilliantly effective: narrow planks underfoot, rope handrails at your sides, and thirty metres of forest air underneath. You walk in one direction, so there is no squeezing past anyone, just a slow, swinging progress through the crowns, with birds at eye level and the forest floor disappearing beneath your feet.
The walkway is a feat of modest engineering, wire rope, aluminium ladders, wooden planks and a cradle of safety netting, rising forty metres above the forest floor and threading past canopies that soar beyond fifty metres. It was built by two Canadian engineers from Vancouver with five Ghanaian assistants, and has been maintained ever since by the staff of the Kakum visitor centre. The concept itself came from Joseph Dudley, a conservation biologist whose feasibility study helped launch Kakum as an ecotourism destination.
A forest full of rare things
Kakum protects one of the last substantial stretches of rainforest in West Africa, and the species list reads like a conservation roll call. The park's most notable endangered residents include:
Forest elephants , as of 2012, Kakum held the densest population of forest elephants in Ghana Diana monkeys and the white-nosed monkey of the Upper Guinea forests The giant bongo antelope and yellow-backed duiker The white-breasted guineafowl , one of eight bird species of global conservation concern recorded here
It is also a Important Bird Area recognised by BirdLife International, with a bird inventory of 266 species, including nine kinds of hornbill and the African grey parrot. Look down as well as up: more than 600 butterfly species have been recorded in the park, one of them newly described to science as recently as 1993.
Conservation here is a working project, not a finished one. Poaching remains a challenge, but the park shares the benefits of its tourism with the communities around it, a model rooted in the fact that the people who campaigned for Kakum in the first place still live beside it, and that gamekeepers in the forest are trained in both the medical and cultural significance of the foliage they protect.
A park the local people created
Kakum has an origin story unlike most. It began in 1931 as a reserve, but the push to protect it came from the local communities living around it rather than from the national wildlife authorities, a rare case of conservation starting from the ground up. The area was gazetted as a national park in 1992 after an initial survey of its birdlife.
Its conservation value is formally recognised too: in 2000, Ghana nominated Kakum to the UNESCO World Heritage List as a natural site, and it remains on UNESCO's tentative list under the criteria for outstanding natural beauty and biodiversity.
The park has the numbers to match the story. Its visitor centre opened on Earth Day 1997, and the following year Kakum won the Global Tourism for Tomorrow Award. Arrivals climbed from about 2,000 visitors in 1992 to more than 70,000 by 1999, by…
Thr…