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The Largest Park in Bolivia's Gran Chaco
Covering 34,411 square kilometers of southeastern Santa Cruz Department, Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco is Bolivia's largest national park and the single biggest protected area anywhere in the Gran Chaco ecoregion, which spans four South American countries. The terrain is almost entirely flat alluvial plain, ranging from 100 meters above sea level up to 839 meters at Cerro San Miguel, and transitions through four distinct Chaco landscapes: riverine forest along the Río Parapetí, the dense thorn forest of the alluvial Chaco, a transitional zone of semi-humid woodland, and the Chaco-Chiquitano transition forest along the northern edge.
The park also encloses Ramsar-listed wetlands. The Bañados del Isoso, a seasonal marsh covering more than 615,000 hectares, is fed by the Río Parapetí, which vanishes underground for six months each year before migrating north toward the Amazon basin. Palmar de las Islas and the Salinas de San José add gleaming salt flats to the landscape. Together with the neighboring Otuquis National Park, the Ñembi Guasu indigenous conservation area, and Paraguay's Defensores del Chaco across the border, Kaa-Iya anchors one of the largest intact dry-forest corridors remaining in the tropics.
