As the oldest park in Africa, Menagesha is just a stone’s throw from Addis Abeba. The park dates back to the reign of Emperor Zera Yaqob, from 1434 to 1468, when he originally designated it a crown forest. In the park, the lower slopes of Mount Damocha are covered with plantation forests, which form a buffer zone for its natural forest, higher up the mountainside that featuring a wide variety of native tree species. While the plantation areas are largely devoid of undergrowth, these natural areas of forest are rich with many different types of smaller trees, bushes, shrubs, groundcovers, and flowers, including big red onion-like flowers that grow from a single stem protruding from a bulb.

At the top of the mountain are medicinal red-hot poker flowers. All these provide a rich habitat for many animals, including the endemic Menelik’s bushbuck, anubis baboon, guereza (colobus monkey), bush pig, warthog, leopard, and serval cat, for example. Many different types of birds, including endemics and semi-endemics, can also be seen.