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Outside Magazine June 2003

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The Pantanal
The Wilder Amazon
Hit the biodiversity jackpot in Brazil's Pantanal

By Christopher Cox


	Swamp Things: The Fazenda Rio Negro's backyard (Fritz Polking/Bruce Coleman)

SIX HOURS EARLIER, hiring a local with a four-wheel-drive pickup truck had sounded like a brilliant idea. But Luciano and his boss's Mitsubishi had proved no match for western Brazil's Pantanal, and now a particularly mucky portion of the 90,000-square-mile wetland was settling in around our bogged-down vehicle.

In the glow of a rising moon, I could see only the lagoon Luciano had swerved to avoid. Luciano ran down his emergency inventory: no flashlight, flares, shovel, or winch. In case of deep muck, like the kind currently gripping our tires, he did have the city dweller's rescue tool of choice, a cell phone.

But we were in a dead zone—nearly 200 winding miles northwest of Campo Grande, the capital of Brazil's Mato Grosso do Sul State—mired in the home turf of millions of toothy alligator-like caimans and the planet's largest jaguars.

Travel Resources

Itching to go to the Pantanal? click here for great lodging and transportation ideas.

In the 16th century, cartographers labeled this watery world the Sea of Xaraes, after a local indigenous tribe. It's easy to understand why: Every fall, rains overwhelm the region. As a result, 80 percent of the shallow basin becomes an Oklahoma-size lake, inundating massive stretches of Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay and rendering roads impassable. In April, the epic flood recedes, leaving a shifting mosaic of open savanna, gallery forests, scrub grassland, and meandering rivers.

This extreme and varied habitat supports 3,500 plant species, 650 bird species, 260 types of fish, and more than 100 different mammals, including such endangered species as the jaguar, the maned wolf, and the giant otter. It is the Pantanal, not the Amazon, where you'll see the greatest concentration of New World fauna.

After the wildly popular Brazilian soap opera Pantanal debuted in 1990, curious travelers began to arrive in the region. Inns appeared along the Trans- pantaneira, a decrepit 90-mile causeway south of Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso State, that is the only route into the northern section of the floodplain. Now a multitude of lodges in the southern Pantanal cater to a growing number of year-round visitors.

In 1999, Conservation International (CI), a Washington, D.C.-based global environmental organization, bought a sprawling ranch—the Fazenda Rio Negro, where Pantanal was filmed—and converted the main house into a guest lodge. The original ranch was founded in 1895 by a descendant of Colonel Candido de Silva Rondon, the famed Brazilian explorer who accompanied Theodore Roosevelt on his 1914 expedition through the Pantanal. Now the fazenda runs just 100 cattle on its 19,000 acres, and its mission has shifted to research, conservation, and low-impact tourism. This month, CI is expected to announce the creation of a 271,700-acre biodiversity protection area composed of three private reserves and the newly established Rio Negro State Park, just west of the Fazenda Rio Negro.

With rustic rooms, two suites, and a guest house, the ranch can accommodate 28 visitors. Its all-inclusive program includes tracking wildlife by horseback, boat, canoe, and open truck. Heaps of free-range beef and savory feijão com arroz, or beans and rice, are on the menu every day. Afternoons are spent taking a siesta in a hammock; sunsets are for sipping lethal caipirinhas. That is, if only we could get there.

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