The Pantanal

The Pantanal - an Introduction to the World's Greatest Tropical Wetland

There are few places on Earth where the sheer scale of life overwhelms the senses as completely as in the Pantanal. Spreading across the heartland of South America, straddling the borders of Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay, this extraordinary ecosystem is the world's largest tropical wetland and one of the most biologically productive environments anywhere on the planet. At its broadest extent, the Pantanal covers between 150,000 and 195,000 square kilometers, an area so vast that it dwarfs famous wetlands elsewhere in the world. The Florida Everglades, celebrated in the United States as a unique natural treasure, covers roughly 6,000 square kilometers. The Pantanal is more than twenty times larger. In its annual flood season, when the Paraguay River and its tributaries overflow their banks and sheet water spreads for hundreds of kilometers across the lowlands, the Pantanal transforms into a shallow inland sea of staggering dimensions, an almost incomprehensible basin of life, water, and light.

The name Pantanal derives from the Portuguese word pantano, meaning swamp or marsh, and in a general sense the word does describe what this place is: a low-lying depression in the interior of the South American continent that collects rainfall, river overflow, and runoff from the surrounding highlands. But the word swamp implies stagnation, and the Pantanal is anything but stagnant. It is a dynamic, rhythmic ecosystem governed by the great annual cycle of flood and drought, expansion and contraction, abundance and concentration. In the wet season, the wetland breathes outward, spreading to its maximum extent, covering savanna, forest, and grassland in a shimmering layer of water that sustains billions of fish, millions of birds, and vast populations of mammals. In the dry season, it contracts, drawing back to its permanent rivers and lakes, and in doing so it concentrates wildlife in spectacles of natural abundance that rival anything Africa can offer.

The Pantanal is not merely large. It is, by most scientific measures, the richest tropical wetland on Earth in terms of sheer visible wildlife. Visitors who travel to the Pantanal, particularly in the dry season months between July and October, encounter a density and diversity of large animals that astonishes even experienced naturalists. Jaguars hunt capybaras along riverbanks in full daylight. Hyacinth macaws, the world's largest parrots, flash brilliant cobalt blue against the canopy of buriti palms. Giant river otters, among the rarest mammals in South America, fish in slow dark rivers while families of giant anteaters shuffle through the grasslands nearby. Caimans pile up by the hundreds on muddy shores, their stillness broken only by the spectacular lunge of a jaguar descending from the bank to take one for its meal. Capybaras, the world's largest rodents, graze in herds of dozens along every waterway, as comfortable in the water as on land. Anacondas coil in the shallows. Marsh deer wade through flooded grasslands. Hundreds of species of birds wheel overhead or stand sentinel in the shallow water, and every morning the air is full of sound, the calls of birds and frogs and howler monkeys carrying across the still water with extraordinary clarity.

To understand the Pantanal is to understand first its physical geography, then its flood cycle, and then the web of life that has evolved in intimate response to that cycle over millions of years. It is also to understand the human history of this place, which stretches from the ancient indigenous peoples who lived within the wetland for thousands of years to the European colonizers who transformed its upland margins into cattle ranches, and finally to the contemporary moment in which the Pantanal faces threats of a severity that its most dire recent history, including devastating fires and accelerating deforestation, make painfully clear.

Location and Geographic Extent

The Pantanal occupies a great basin in the interior of South America, lying predominantly within the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, with significant extensions reaching into the eastern lowlands of Bolivia and the northwestern corner of Paraguay. Geographically it sits between roughly 16 and 22 degrees south latitude and between 55 and 58 degrees west longitude, placing it within the tropical zone of the Southern Hemisphere. The basin is bounded to the north and east by the highlands of central Brazil, the ancient, deeply weathered plateau known as the Planalto Central, and to the west by the foothills and lowlands that lead toward the Andes. To the south, the basin opens gradually into the more temperate lowlands of Paraguay and northern Argentina.