The park is located south of Malindi town extending to Mida creek. It neighbors the Gede ruins and Arabuko Sokoke forest. The park is enveloped by a national reserve and a 100ft strip of coastal land starting from Vasco-da-Gama pillar to Watamu. The reserve extends 3.5 nautical miles to seaward. The park is endowed with magnificent resources such as fringing reefs, coral, sea grass, mangroves, mudflats, high fish diversity, marine mammals, turtles and shorebirds. The fringing reef is close to shore and exposed during low tide, but drops gradually to a sea grass bed that descends precipitously to the deep Barracuda Channel..

The park is 39,206 hectares (392 km2; 151 sq mi)[1] in size at the core of an 8,000 km2 (3,100 sq mi) ecosystem that spreads across the Kenya-Tanzania border. The local people are mainly Maasai, but people from other parts of the country have settled there attracted by the successful tourist-driven economy and intensive agriculture along the system of swamps that makes this low-rainfall area (average 350 mm (14 in)) one of the best wildlife-viewing experiences in the world with 400 species of birds including water birds, pelicans, kingfishers, crakes, hammerkops, and 47 types of raptors. The park protects two of the five main swamps, and includes a dried-up Pleistocene lake and semiarid vegetation. About 240 km (150 mi) southeast from the capital city Nairobi, Amboseli National Park is the second-most popular national park in Kenya after Maasai Mara National Reserve.

was established in 1949 to protect Mount Kenya, the wildlife and surrounding environment, which forms a habitat for wild animals, as well as acting as an area for the catchment of water, to supply Kenya's water.