5.0-star rated
Every Google review so far: five stars. Clean, peaceful & well maintained.
Chimanimani Mountains · Manicaland · Zimbabwe
Escape the noise.
Stay, meet & unwind in Chimanimani.
A warm, tranquil bed & breakfast and conference venue nestled beneath the peaks of Chimanimani — surrounded by misty valleys, indigenous forest and complete serenity.
- ★ 5.0 on Google
- Free Starlink Wi-Fi
- En-suite rooms
- Mountain-view venue
Why guests choose Eland Sanctuary
Starlink Wi-Fi, free
Fast satellite internet in the middle of the mountains — work, stream, share.
Comfort-first rooms
En-suite bathrooms, geyser-hot water, electric blankets and calm modern finishes.
Retreat-ready venue
A conference room with views of Pork Pie Mountain and the Eland Sanctuary.
Bed & Breakfast in Chimanimani
A bed & breakfast built for rest after a day exploring Chimanimani
Wake up to panoramic mountain views, fresh highland air and birdsong. Our rooms are made for deep comfort after hiking waterfalls and peaks — and a hearty, chef-cooked breakfast is available to order each morning.
- Electric blankets for chilly mountain nights
- En-suite bathrooms for privacy and convenience
- Geyser-heated hot water — steaming baths and showers, even on misty mountain mornings
- Backup water supply — big storage tanks keep the taps and showers flowing
- Calm, modern finishes for a restful stay
- Breakfast available to order — a hearty, chef-cooked start to your day
- Free Starlink Wi-Fi — fast internet, even up here
From Our Kitchen
Garden-to-table dining in Chimanimani — three decades of flavour
Meals at Eland Sanctuary are in seasoned hands. Our chef brings over 30 years of experience in the hospitality sector — formerly Head Chef and General Manager at the Chimanimani Hotel, and before that with Rainbow Tourism Group hotels across Zimbabwe.
Expect honest mountain cooking: vegetables picked straight from our own garden, with produce sourced from small-scale farmers around Chimanimani for fresher, more organic plates — menus follow the seasons and what's available. Breakfast and other meals can be added to your stay — just tell us when you book.
- 30+ years of craft
- Garden-to-table vegetables
- Sourced from local small-scale farmers
Conference Venue in Chimanimani
A conference venue in the Chimanimani Mountains, where productivity meets nature
Swap the boardroom ceiling for breathtaking views over the Eland Sanctuary, with clear sightlines of Pork Pie Mountain and the surrounding pine and gum forests. An inspiring environment for teams from across Manicaland and beyond to think bigger.
- Retreats & team-building away from every distraction
- Workshops & training in natural light
- Strategy sessions with mountain sightlines
- Starlink internet for hybrid & remote participants
- Stay on site — combine your event with B&B accommodation
Gallery
A look around Eland Sanctuary
Real photos from the guest house — tap any picture to view it full size.
Guest Reviews
Rated on Google
★★★★★"The place is clean, peaceful, and well maintained. The staff were friendly and welcoming, and the environment is calm and relaxing."
★★★★★"Lovely place with great views."
★★★★★"Lovely place! I strongly recommend."
Explore Chimanimani
Your base for the Eastern Highlands
Adventure, relaxation or business — Eland Sanctuary is the perfect springboard for everything the Chimanimani area offers. Read our full Chimanimani guide →
Bridal Veil Falls
One of Zimbabwe's prettiest waterfalls, cascading 50 m down mossy rock — a short scenic drive from the village.
Chimanimani National Park
Quartzite peaks, hidden valleys and hiking trails up to Mount Binga — the highest peak in the Chimanimani range and the highest mountain in Mozambique.
The Eland Sanctuary
The protected reserve we're named after — grasslands and forest right on our doorstep, with superb viewpoints.
Pork Pie Mountain
The distinctive flat-topped peak our conference room looks out on — glowing at sunrise and sunset.
Tessa's Pool
A crystal-clear natural swimming hole beneath a small waterfall — the classic Chimanimani dip.
Chimanimani Village
Markets, craft shops and mountain-town charm minutes away — with guides available for every trail.
Plan your Chimanimani adventure
These are the sites we send our own guests before they arrive — perfect for daydreaming about waterfalls, picking your first trail, or checking what's on in the village.
- Chimanimani Tourist Association Our local association — attractions, mountain guides and village news
- Chimanimani National Park — ZimParks The official park guide — trails, wildlife and the best seasons to visit
- Zimbabwe Field Guide: the Park Wonderfully detailed trail notes — caves, the mountain hut and plenty of history
- Zimbabwe Field Guide: Bridal Veil Falls All about the waterfall on our doorstep — inside the sanctuary we're named after
- Zimbabwe Tourism Authority The national guide to the Eastern Highlands and beyond
- TripAdvisor: Things to do What fellow travellers loved most around Chimanimani
…or simply ask us when you book — plotting routes over breakfast is our favourite part of the job.
Attraction photos: Bridal Veil Falls by John Mullen (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Chimanimani peaks by Collinsmac (CC BY-SA 4.0) · eland by Charles J. Sharp (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Tessa's Pool by Brian Gratwicke (CC BY 2.0) · village by JackyR (CC BY-SA 3.0). Pork Pie Mountain and all property photos are our own.
Mountain Weather
Chimanimani weather — right now at Eland Sanctuary
Live conditions and the days ahead at the guest house — handy for planning your hikes to Bridal Veil Falls and the peaks.
The live forecast is out of reach right now — check the Chimanimani forecast here.
Live forecast for Chimanimani (-19.82, 32.87) by Open-Meteo. Mountain evenings are crisp year-round — every bed has an electric blanket.
Did you know?
Stories from Chimanimani's past
Every stay here comes with a few good fireside stories. These are all true — checked against UNESCO records, academic research, park archives and local historians.
The people of these mountains
Welcome to Ndau country
Chimanimani is the heartland of the Ndau people, whose communities have lived around these mountains for generations and span both sides of the Zimbabwe–Mozambique border. Even the town's name comes from the Ndau word Tshimanimani — "to be squeezed together." Their language, ChiNdau, is one of the sixteen officially recognised languages in Zimbabwe's Constitution — and it's the language you'll hear in the villages around town.
Old paths, gold, and the sea
Gold and ivory flowed from the Zimbabwe plateau to the Indian Ocean port of Sofala from as early as the tenth century, and historians believe the Buzi River — whose headwaters rise in these very mountains — was one of the ancient routes inland. Exactly which paths the old traders walked, no one can say — but footpaths have crossed these mountains for generations, far older than any border.
A border drawn through the mountains
In 1891 a colonial treaty drew a boundary straight along the Chimanimani range, dividing the Ndau between two countries. But mountains are hard to fence: families kept walking the old footpaths, and today Zimbabwe and Mozambique manage the massif together as a transfrontier conservation area — the border remains on the map, but the mountains are shared once more.
Six chieftainships keep custom alive
The valleys around Chimanimani are watched over by long-established chieftainships — Chikukwa, Ngorima, Mutambara, Muusha and Ndima — whose histories reach back long before the town existed. A sixth, Saurombe, was restored in July 2024 after some seventy years. The chiefs remain living custodians of land, custom and ceremony throughout the district.
The water spirit of Bridal Veil Falls
Local people call the falls Mutsarara, after the sound of the falling water, and tradition holds that the pool is home to a njuzu — a water spirit deeply respected in Ndau culture. Old custom asks visitors to be gentle at such pools: no soap in the water, quiet rules that have protected mountain springs here for generations.
Sacred mountains, recognised by UNESCO
In 2022 UNESCO declared Chimanimani a Biosphere Reserve, recognising not just rare flowers and misty peaks but a living cultural landscape — its own description records "sacred pools and springs, burial places, forests, shrines and ancient tunnels." We ask guests, as locals do, to treat the mountains' quiet places with respect.
Chikukwa: the villages that regreened their hills
In 1991, six villages in the Chikukwa area began a quiet revolution: healing eroded slopes and dried-up springs through permaculture. Three decades on, their community trust is celebrated internationally as one of Africa's most inspiring land-restoration stories — streams flowing again, food gardens thriving. Caring for the land here is a homegrown tradition, not an import.
Tales from settlers, parks & peaks
The village began with an ox-wagon trek
In May 1892, Thomas "Groot Tom" Moodie led 29 families and 17 ox-wagons out of South Africa's Orange Free State. Nine punishing months later, on 3 January 1893, a hardy remnant of seven wagons reached these green hills. Moodie named the settlement Melsetter, after his family's ancestral home in Scotland's Orkney Islands — and the wagon-topped Trek Memorial still stands in the village today.
Three names in ninety years
For almost a century the village was Melsetter. After independence it was renamed Mandidzudzure in 1982 — but the name never stuck, and after consultation with residents it was changed once more, to Chimanimani, after the mountains that watch over it.
Pork Pie is a hill with two names
The rounded hill behind the village is officially Nyamzure (1,770 m), but everyone calls it Pork Pie — so named, locals say, because its neatly domed profile reminded early settlers of a raised pork pie. Visitors have been making the trip up for the view since at least the 1950s — and it's the very hill our conference room looks out on.
Our namesake was born to save pine trees
In the 1950s, botanist and forester John Ball found eland straying out of the hills and trampling young pine plantations. His answer was a dedicated sanctuary above the village where the giant antelope could roam in peace. That reserve — the Eland Sanctuary — is our namesake, and it also shelters Bridal Veil Falls, the 50-metre cascade locals call Mutsarara, whose pool is said to be home to a water spirit, the nzuzu.
Stand in two countries at once
Mount Binga (2,436 m) — Mozambique's highest mountain and Zimbabwe's second-highest — sits exactly on the border, marked by beacon number 71, so a hiker on the summit stands with one foot in each country. Legend has it that on a perfectly clear day you could glimpse the Indian Ocean, 190 km away, through a telescope.
Tessa's Pool really is named after a baby
While John Ball was building the famous stone mountain hut, his wife Lucy would wait with their baby daughter Tessa at the pools below. When surveyor Ted Tucker later mapped the mountains, he marked the spot "Tessa's Pool" — and the name stuck. The pool sits at the base of Outward Bound Zimbabwe, an adventure school running since 1961 and one of the oldest in Africa.
A world treasure, officially
These mountains shelter roughly 78 plant species found nowhere else on Earth, plus bearded vultures and ancient rock-art sites — over 350,000 hectares of UNESCO-recognised Biosphere Reserve, only Zimbabwe's second. And in December 2025, Zimbabwe formally submitted the area — including the Eland Sanctuary itself — to UNESCO's World Heritage Tentative List.
Ready to hear these stories fireside?
Two taps and your enquiry is on our phone.
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
Where exactly are you located?
521 Medium Way, Chimanimani, Zimbabwe — in the heart of the Chimanimani Mountains, Manicaland Province. Plus code: 5VJC+2M Chimanimani. See the map below for directions.
Do you have Wi-Fi?
Yes — fast, free Starlink internet. You can take video calls, upload your hike photos and stream in the evening, all from the mountains.
What makes the conference venue special?
Sweeping views over the Eland Sanctuary with clear sightlines of Pork Pie Mountain and the surrounding pine and gum forests. It's an environment designed for clear thinking — ideal for retreats, workshops and strategy sessions. Ask us about day packages and catering when you book.
How do I book?
The fastest way is WhatsApp or a phone call: +263 77 325 0805. Or use the enquiry form below — it sends your details straight to our WhatsApp.
What should I pack for Chimanimani?
Layers! Mountain evenings get chilly (that's why every bed has an electric blanket), plus walking shoes, a rain jacket and a swimsuit for Tessa's Pool.
Book your escape
Send us a booking enquiry
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Find us
Eland Sanctuary B&B
and Conference Venue
Address
521 Medium Way, Chimanimani, Zimbabwe
Plus code: 5VJC+2M Chimanimani · Manicaland Province
Call or WhatsApp
+263 77 325 0805 ·
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On Google
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