A lot of people search online for an answer to the question “do lions live in the jungle?” The answer is No.
The lion is sometimes said to be the “King of the Jungle”. This is incorrect. Perhaps in this context the word “jungle” is meant to mean a competitive world where animals fight for survival rather than being a description of the habitat in which the lion lives, which is not the jungle but which is exemplified by the well-known Serengeti plains of east Africa.
Elsewhere the lion lives in woodlands, dry forest, scrub and even deserts. Visibility for the lion is a common factor throughout these various habitat types by which I mean that, compared with tigers, leopards and Jaguars, the lion is at home in more open areas. The lion is not at home in a jungle and, in fact, where the lion lives, in sub-Saharan Africa and the Gir forest in north-western Indi, there are no jungles. Lions are mainly terrestrial.
It is the tiger who is the king of the jungle and not the lion. The tiger lives in a great variety of habitat types from tropical lowland evergreen forests to the coniferous birch woodlands of Siberia. That is not necessarily, always the jungle but the tiger is more at home in the jungle. In fact they live in the tallgrass jungles of the southern Himalaya as well.
There’s a page on this website concerning the lion habitat which covers the topic in some detail.
Sources: Myself and Wild Cats Of The World by the Sunquists.
I always felt that lions lived, mostly, in plains and flat lands.
But, I was, also, led to believe that they lived in jungles because, as you say, they are called “king…”
Most of all, I was misled as a kid by those Tarzan of the Jungle movies that showed so many lions.