The Ngorongoro Conservation Area is a protected area and a World Heritage Site located 180 km (110 mi) west of Arusha in the Crater Highlands area of Tanzania. The area is named after Ngorongoro Crater, a large volcanic caldera within the area.

The conservation area is administered by the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority, an arm of the Tanzanian government, and its boundaries follow the boundary of the Ngorongoro Division of the Arusha Region.

The 2009 Ngorongoro Wildlife Conservation Act placed new restrictions on human settlement and subsistence farming in the Crater, displacing Maasai pastoralists, most of whom had been relocated to Ngorongoro from their ancestral lands to the north when the British colonial government established Serengeti National Park in 1959.

The Ngorongoro crater is also the world’s largest inactive caldera. The crater floor covers about 260 square kilometers and is the crater is about 600 meters deep. Due to the collapse of an active volcano over 2 million years ago, the Ngorongoro crater was formed.

Standing proudly in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area of Tanzania is the Ngorongoro Crater. This highly visited African attraction is the world’s largest inactive, unbroken and unfilled volcanic caldera. … This explosion created a caldera approximately two and a half million years ago.