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Ghana-Net.com · Upper East Region · Kassena Nankana West
Two sacred ponds on the Burkina Faso border where visitors sit beside wild crocodiles for a photograph, and have done for generations without a recorded death. The taboo protecting them is real and has saved a population that is hunted everywhere else. They are still crocodiles.
There are two ponds. The Chief's Pond is the older and better known; Zenga Pond is the other, with its own guides and its own arrangement. Both operate the same way and both are managed by the community under the chief and the traditional leadership.
You arrive, you pay, and a guide takes you to the water's edge with a live chicken. The guide calls the crocodiles. One comes out. The chicken is used to bring it up onto the bank and to hold its attention. While it is occupied, you are invited to sit behind it, touch its back, and hold the tail for a photograph.
Then the chicken is given to the crocodile, and that part is not hidden from you.
Be clear with yourself in advance about the chicken. It is killed and eaten in front of you, at close range, by a large reptile. Nobody at Paga pretends otherwise and there is no version of the visit without it — the feeding is the mechanism that brings the animal out of the water and occupies it. Visitors who have not thought about this beforehand are sometimes genuinely upset. If you have children with you, decide before you arrive rather than at the pond.
The whole thing takes twenty minutes to half an hour. The guides are employed by the chief and the traditional authorities, they know the individual animals, and they are the reason the arrangement works.
The Kassena people of Paga hold that each crocodile in these ponds carries the soul of a person from the community. Not symbolically — as a matter of lineage. To harm a crocodile is to harm your own family, and the consequence falls on the offender and on the land.
The founding story exists in several tellings. In the common form, an ancestor of Paga — pursued, or lost, or dying of thirst depending on who is telling it — was saved by a crocodile that carried him across water or led him to it. He swore that neither he nor his descendants would ever harm the animals. That oath is the arrangement you are standing in.
No crocodile from these ponds may be killed, harmed or eaten. No weapons at the water. Offerings — chickens, sometimes milk — are made, not taken. When a crocodile dies, it is given funeral rites, because a member of the community has died.
Whatever you personally believe about reincarnation, the taboo is a functioning conservation instrument. It has kept a viable crocodile population alive in an area where the same species is hunted, drained out and squeezed by farming. Taboo protection at Paga, at Boabeng-Fiema and at Tafi Atome has, in several documented cases, outperformed statutory protection in Ghana's gazetted reserves.
These are West African crocodiles, Crocodylus suchus — also called the sacred or desert crocodile. This matters more than it sounds, and almost no page about Paga gets to it.
For most of scientific history C. suchus was treated as the same animal as the Nile crocodile, C. niloticus, and it was only relatively recently confirmed as a distinct species. It is smaller and markedly less aggressive: typically 2 to 3.3 metres and 70 to 100 kg, exceptionally to around 4 metres. A Nile crocodile of the same age is a different proposition entirely.
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire described the species in 1807 — not from a living animal but from an ancient Egyptian crocodile mummy. The name suchus comes from Sobek, the Egyptian crocodile god, rendered in Greek as Souchos. The species was literally named for the fact that people had worshipped it. Paga is not an isolated curiosity; it is the surviving West African end of a very old relationship.
The lower aggression of C. suchus relative to the Nile crocodile is a genuine species trait recorded well beyond Paga, and it is a substantial part of why this tradition is possible here and would be lethal elsewhere. The animals at Paga are also habituated by generations of regular feeding and human proximity.
These are wild animals living in a wild pond, not kept stock. Nobody owns them, nobody confines them, and nobody has bred docility into them. They tolerate people because they have never had reason not to, and because a chicken arrives.
The species is listed on CITES Appendix II, and across its West and Central African range it is under pressure from habitat loss, drainage and hunting. Paga is one of the places where it is doing comparatively well.
Mostly, and not entirely, and you should have the actual record rather than the reassurance.
What is true: there is no recorded fatality at the Paga ponds. Generations of local children have grown up around this water. Thousands of visitors a year sit for the photograph without incident. The guides read the animals well and control the encounter.
What is also true: in March 2006 crocodiles attacked a film crew working at the site. In 2022 a video circulated of a near-attack on a cameraman during what should have been a routine tourist interaction. Neither produced a death. Both happened.
Feeding-based habituation does not remove predatory instinct. It suppresses the reasons for it to fire. A crocodile that feels crowded, cornered, or that has been waiting too long for food it can see, is running on the same equipment as every other crocodile.
Do exactly what the guide says, in the order they say it. Approach from behind, never from the front or the side of the head. Do not crowd the animal. Do not put a child within reach unsupervised. Do not stand between a crocodile and the water — that is the escape route, and blocking it is how a calm animal stops being calm.
Photographers and camera crews are over-represented in the incidents that have occurred. The pattern is the same everywhere: someone gets low, gets close, moves suddenly, stays too long, and stops watching the animal because they are watching a viewfinder. If you are here to shoot rather than to look, that is precisely when to be most disciplined.
One correction to something you will read elsewhere. Some sources describe the Paga crocodiles as "tame" and suggest visitors can swim in the ponds. Do not swim in the ponds. These are wild crocodiles in open water, the visitor arrangement depends entirely on a guide managing a fed animal on a bank, and nothing about it extends to being in the water with them.
Some visitors find the experience wonderful. Some find it uncomfortable. Both reactions are reasonable and you should know what the argument is before you decide.
A wild animal is being called out of its habitat on demand, baited with food, and handled by strangers for photographs, several times a day. Its feeding has been restructured around a tourist schedule rather than its own. Critics of wildlife interaction tourism would call this by its ordinary name regardless of how old the tradition is, and the chicken is killed for a photograph.
The taboo predates tourism by generations and the crocodiles were protected long before anyone paid to see them. The revenue now funds the feeding, the guides and the ponds' upkeep, and it gives the whole community a concrete reason to maintain a protection that costs them land and water. Remove the tourism and you do not get an unmolested crocodile population — you get one with no economic constituency in a district under severe agricultural pressure.
We are not going to resolve that for you. What we will not do is pretend the question is not there, which is the standard approach of every tourism page about Paga.
If you would rather not handle the animals, say so on arrival. You can watch the feeding, listen to the account, photograph the pond and skip the contact entirely. The guides are not offended by this and you should still pay the full fee and tip — the point is to support the arrangement, not to extract a discount from it.
Half an hour to an hour. Easily combined with Pikworo the same morning, and that pairing is the right way to spend a day in Paga.
Paga sits directly on the Burkina Faso frontier in the Kassena Nankana West District. The border post is in the town.
The practical base — a short run north on a decent road with regular trotros and shared taxis through the day. Both ponds are in or beside the town itself, so once you are in Paga you are effectively there.
Around four hours. Tamale has reliable scheduled flights from Accra, which makes flying north and hiring locally far more sensible than driving the length of the country. See our public transport page.
The frontier is right there and crossing is physically simple. Whether you should is a separate question of current security conditions and entry requirements, and not one a travel page should answer for you. Check your own government's current advice before planning anything continuing north.
Paga is a long way from anywhere and deserves more than a photograph. Give it a day: the ponds, Pikworo, the border market, and the Kassena compound architecture in the surrounding villages, which is among the most distinctive building tradition in West Africa.
The crocodiles are what brings people. They are not the most significant thing within three kilometres.
Practical details last verified . Species identification, size range and CITES listing for Crocodylus suchus from published herpetological sources; the species was described by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1807 and was long treated as conspecific with the Nile crocodile. Descriptions of the visitor encounter draw on published academic work on community-based tourism at the Paga ponds. The March 2006 attack on a film crew and the 2022 near-attack on a cameraman are documented incidents; no fatality has been recorded at the site. Origin traditions are recorded orally and are told in several forms. Fees, guide arrangements and road conditions change — confirm locally before travelling.