Amashyaza Hot Springs

Amashyaza Hot Springs is a natural chloride-mineral thermal spring in the Nyakabuye area of the Western Province of Rwanda, near the shores of Lake Kivu, where warm volcanic spring waters emerge in the landscape of the Congo-Nile Divide — the watershed ridge separating the Congo and Nile river basins that runs through Rwanda's Western Province and is the source of the Nile's most distant headwaters. The springs are part of the geothermal activity associated with the East African Rift System's Kivu segment, where volcanic activity has produced the extraordinary Lake Kivu — one of Africa's Great Lakes — and numerous thermal springs along its shores in both Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Rwanda's extraordinary post-genocide recovery and transformation into one of Africa's most environmentally progressive and tourism-friendly nations creates a remarkable national context for the discovery of natural thermal resources like Amashyaza in a country whose ecological heritage is increasingly recognised for the mountain gorillas of Volcanoes National Park and the biodiversity of the Congo-Nile Divide forests.