Samara Karoo Reserve Mourns the Passing of Co-Founder Mark Tompkins
Samara Karoo Reserve has announced the death of its co-founder, Mark Tompkins, who established the 27,000-hectare conservation project in South Africa's Great Karoo alongside his wife Sarah in 1997. Educated at the University of Cambridge and INSEAD Business School, Tompkins built a career in investment banking, healthcare and property before turning his attention to large-scale ecological restoration in the semi-arid Graaff-Reinet district of the Eastern Cape - a region once home to vast springbok migrations but largely stripped of its wildlife through centuries of farming.
Over nearly three decades, Tompkins assembled eleven farms to create what is today one of South Africa's most recognised conservation and rewilding destinations, home to lion, elephant, cheetah, Cape mountain zebra and blue crane. Guided by scientific rigour and a clear economic model built around responsible luxury tourism, his vision produced an award-winning safari operation that continues to generate local livelihoods while advancing a landscape-scale restoration mission. Samara Karoo Reserve paid tribute to Tompkins as a man of principle, generosity and vision, noting that he remained a source of counsel to those around him until his passing.
Source: Samara Karoo Reserve
