About the park
About Pilanesberg National Park: the crater, the land and the board
Pilanesberg is a ring of hills about 25 km across, the eroded root of a volcano, fenced into a game reserve two hours from Johannesburg. It is provincial, not a SANParks park, and the land it stands on was largely community land. Both facts explain what you pay and why the roads look the way they do.
If you only want the answer
About 570 km² of grassland and bush inside the rings of the Pilanesberg Alkaline Ring Complex, dated to 1,395 million years ago, in North West Province about 50 km north of Rustenburg, with Sun City on its southern edge. It was proclaimed in 1977 and fenced and restocked from 1979. The North West Parks and Tourism Board manages it; in October 2025 its acting CEO said the board faced closure without a new funding model.
A crater that is really a volcano's root
The park sits on the Pilanesberg Alkaline Ring Complex: the eroded root zone of an extinct volcano, which shows on the surface as concentric rings of hills rising 300 to 600 metres above the plain. Uranium-lead dating puts it at 1,395 million years (Elburg and Cawthorn, 2017). The older figures of 1.2 to 1.3 billion years come from earlier work, and the 1.8 billion years on some websites has no support.
The outer ring is about 24 km across and the whole intrusive complex covers about 625 km², among the largest alkaline ring complexes known. Red syenite outcrops form boulder thickets, and ferricrete keeps the open grasslands treeless. The highest point is Matlhorwe at 1,687 m, and the largest water is Mankwe Dam, about 2 km², built by farmers in the late 1950s.
How big is Pilanesberg?
About 570 km². The most-cited scholarly figure is 572 km² (Carruthers, Koedoe, 2011), but other sources give 550 km², 55,000 ha, 57,000 ha and 580 km², and the same Koedoe paper also says about 50,000 ha. Part of the spread may come from the private reserve on the western side, which is fenced in with the park; that has not been confirmed.
Claims that Pilanesberg is the fourth-largest park in South Africa are unsupported: Madikwe alone is about 750 km².
Where two kinds of savanna meet
The crater lies on the transition between arid Kalahari savanna and moist bushveld (Carruthers 2011, citing Mucina and Rutherford 2006). That is why springbok and impala graze the same plains, and why Kalahari birds turn up beside bushveld species. Rain falls mostly between October and March, 600 to 700 mm a year, with regular droughts.
The zones of the park
| Zone | What it is |
|---|---|
| Main park on public roads | Most of the crater. Four tarred roads (Kubu, Kgabo, Tshwene, Tau) and about 188 km of track in all, open to self-drivers through four public gates. |
| Exclusive-use zone in the south-west | Shepherd's Tree Game Lodge's area inside the main park, with a private entrance off the R565; guests only. |
| Private reserve on the western side | A privately owned reserve fenced in with the park, so animals move freely between them. Its lodges are guided only: guests may not self-drive. |
| Pilanesberg Centre | The old magistrate's court near Mankwe Dam, in the middle of the park; its 2026 restaurant status is unconfirmed. |
Sources: Wikipedia for the road network and 110 km of game fence built from 1979; lodge sites for the guided-only rule on the private reserve.
Who made the park, and on whose land
Pilanesberg was created by the apartheid-era Bophuthatswana homeland government through its development body Agricor, planned together with Sun City from 1978. It was proclaimed in 1977, and fencing and restocking began in 1979, when Operation Genesis brought in about 6,000 animals of 22 species.
Much of the land came from communities: 8,500 ha from the Bakgatla, about 4,500 ha from the Bakubung and 1,000 ha from private owners, alongside about 46,000 ha of state land expropriated earlier from white farmers. Communities were removed. The Welgeval community later won a land claim and leased the land back to the park, and the Bakgatla dispute how voluntary their 1979 agreement was. Today the park is a community-owned landscape managed by the province, and the board names four Community Property Associations as prospective co-investors.
The board, and why it matters to your visit
The North West Parks and Tourism Board, a provincial body, runs Pilanesberg; it is not part of SANParks, so no Wild Card is valid. Golden Leopard Resorts, a state-owned company now under the board, runs the Manyane and Bakgatla resorts, and private concessionaires run the lodges.
In October 2025 the board's acting CEO told Tourism Update that it faced closure without a new funding model: staff had gone unpaid earlier that year, and picnic sites and ablutions were in dire need of refurbishment. The answer was the tariff of 1 December 2025, which raised the foreign adult fee from R110 to R748. In August 2026 the board reported more than 80 km of road graded; tour operators still described the roads as in very poor shape.
Sources
- Carruthers 2011, Pilanesberg National Park, Koedoe 53(1) (read 24 Sep 2026)
- Wikipedia: Pilanesberg (geology and dating, read 24 Sep 2026)
- Wikipedia: Pilanesberg National Park (read 24 Sep 2026)
- Tourism Update: Pilanesberg upgrade drives steep tariff hikes (Oct 2025)
- Travel News: Pilanesberg works to restore trade confidence (5 Aug 2026)
- Parliamentary Monitoring Group oversight report, 21 to 22 Oct 2025