Sempaya Hot Springs in Uganda - A Step Into Nature

You might wonder how hot spring is formed! Hot springs, springs that emit water ranging in temperature from about 30° to 104°C, are found in two geologic settings. First, Groundwater begins as rain, seeping deep into the ground until it hits solid rock and can go no further. Collecting in underground pools called aquifers, heated in warm bedrock at depth, ﬂows up to the ground surface. This water brings heat with it as it rises. Such hot springs form in places where faults or fractures provide a high-permeability conduit for deep water or where the water emitted in a discharge region followed a trajectory that ﬁrst carried it deep into the crust called vents. Second, hot springs develop in geothermal regions, places where volcanism currently takes place or has occurred recently, so that magma and/or very hot rock resides close to the Earth’s surface. A Places where groundwater pools on the ground are called springs and only very few springs produce water hot enough to earn the name hot spring.

while the scientists have a technical explanation to the origins of the hot springs, the indigenous Bamaga clan neighboring the tourist attraction in Semuliki National Park have their own story from the folk lore of the hot spring formation.

According to Mzee Adonia Balinsanga the head of the Bamaga clan, the site of the steaming male hot spring is historical. It is said the Bamaga women had gone to fetch firewood from the forest when they sighted a hairy man dressed in bark cloth wielding a spear and with dog moving in a zig-zag formation around that location. The women ran back home to tell their husbands who decided to pick and take him to their homes and subsequently got him a wife from the same village.The said man who later became known as Biteete, continued hunting but one time never returned home. After three days, the men went out to search for him and at the present day male hot spring they only found a spear but no traces of the man nor his dog. It was assumed he had disappeared from the same spot ad they ran back to tell the wife (Nyansimbi) who also ran to the forest never to return. In the subsequent search, only her clothes were found at the present day female hot spring. This was how the two springs became to be known as the male and female hot springs and to-date the Bamaga believe their female ancestors live beneath the female hot spring while their male ancestors live at the male spring.
This is why the Bamaga perform annual rituals at the springs to appease their ancestors and the national park allows them access. Credits to UWA for the story content

Water from hot springs is said to have many beneficial properties such as healing, but springs also provide spectacular tourist attractions.

The Sempaya Hot springs are found in Semuliki National park in western Uganda. The park is located in the western part of Uganda, bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo, and it is one of Uganda’s less visited national parks. These amazing springs have high temperatures up to 100 degrees Celsius and can be found in two places set in a lush swampy clearing close to the southern-eastern corner of the forest.

The locals refer to one as being female called Nyasimbi and the other being male called Bintente. The idea that they are male and female comes from the Bamaga clan’s folk lore; they believe that their female ancestors live under Nyasimbi and their male ancestors under Bintente.

The female spring is dominated is dominated by a boiling geyser (103 degrees C) which spurts up to 2m high from a white, iced cake-like base of precipitated mineral and the male spring is a pool of hot water.

The trek to see these hot springs takes you through beautiful nature and can lead you to see other forest wonders like the mangabey monkeys, the red tailed monkey, the black and while colobus monkey and vegetation diversity.