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Stand on the low cliffs at Tarifa, the southernmost tip of continental Europe, on a clear morning, and Africa is right there in front of you. Not as a rumour or a line on a map, but as a solid wall of Moroccan hills across the water, close enough that you feel you could almost reach them, the way you might look across a wide river to the far bank. Only about fourteen kilometres of sea separate the two continents here. Ships pass, gulls wheel, plus the water itself moves with

In a courtyard at the zoo in Rabat, a lion with a heavy, dark mane paces along a wall. He looks, to most visitors, like any other lion. But he carries something unusual: he descends from a collection of lions kept for generations by the sultans and kings of Morocco, one of the last living threads connecting the country to the great Atlas lions that once roamed its mountains. Those wild lions are gone. The last of them vanished from North Africa's peaks around a century ago, s

From a lookout on the cliffs above Plettenberg Bay, on South Africa's southern Cape coast, a spotter scans the turquoise shallows. Then it appears: a dark, unmistakable torpedo shape, sliding just beneath the surface close to a beach full of swimmers. A great white shark. A few years ago, this was an unusual sight here. Now it is increasingly common, common enough that safety teams have set up watch posts along this stretch of coast for the first time. Meanwhile, a couple of