Mbeya Highlands

The Mbeya region has long been home to peoples such as the Nyakyusa, Safwa and Nyiha, farming the rich volcanic soils of the Southern Highlands and trading across what are now the borders with Zambia and Malawi. Mbeya town itself is relatively young, founded in the 1920s under British administration as a service centre for the gold rush at nearby Lupa and for the surrounding farming districts.

Through the 20th century Mbeya grew as an agricultural and transport hub, its cool, fertile highlands producing tea, coffee, bananas and other crops. The completion of the TAZARA (Tanzania-Zambia) Railway in the 1970s, linking Dar es Salaam to the Zambian Copperbelt, and the Tanzam Highway cemented the region's role as a gateway between Tanzania and its southern neighbours, and the Tunduma border remains one of East Africa's busiest crossings.

Conservation came late but significantly to the highlands. In 2005 Kitulo National Park was gazetted on the Kitulo Plateau, becoming the first national park in tropical Africa established primarily to protect its flora, its montane grasslands famed for orchids and wildflowers. Together with the forests of Mount Rungwe and the crater lakes around Tukuyu, these protected areas have given the once purely agricultural region a growing reputation as a destination for eco-tourism and hiking.