Saruni Rhino sits within the 839,000-acre Sera Community Conservancy in northern Kenya, home to the first community-owned and managed rhino sanctuary in Africa. Today the sanctuary protects 27 black rhino and five white rhino. Accompanied by an expert guide and a trained Sera ranger, you can track white rhino on foot. It is a privilege that exists only because the Samburu community chose to protect this land and everything that lives on it.

With just four bandas set along a dry riverbed lined with doum palms, this is one of the most intimate camps in our collection. Each banda is named after a rhino born in or brought to the sanctuary, and the family banda overlooks a waterhole visited by elephant, impala and a host of birds. A swimming pool, a sand-floored bar in the riverbed for sundowners, and starlit bush dinners complete the setting.

The wildlife extends well beyond the rhino. The Samburu Special Five, Grévy’s zebra, reticulated giraffe, Beisa oryx, Somali ostrich and gerenuk, move through this landscape as they always have, unhurried and entirely at home, alongside leopard, striped hyena and African wild dog. Nearby, at the Singing Wells, Samburu herders still sing to their cattle as they draw water from deep in the earth, a tradition you are welcome to witness. In season, thousands of sandgrouse descend on the waterholes in one of the north’s great spectacles.

A stay at Saruni Rhino is part safari, part conservation story. You will leave with a different understanding of what it means to protect a wilderness, and of the people who have always belonged to it.