Travel to Noel Kempff Mercado

The Huanchaca Plateau, also called the Caparuch or Caparú Meseta, is a Precambrian sandstone tableland over a billion years old, roughly 150 kilometers long and about 45 kilometers wide on the Bolivian side. Rising 500 to 700 meters above the surrounding lowland plain, with cliffs locally reaching 300 meters of sheer rock, the plateau holds 42,000 hectares of intact Cerrado savanna at elevations approaching 1,000 meters. Its sister range across the Río Verde in Brazil, the Serra Ricardo Franco, completes a 7,000-square-kilometer block of protected sandstone wilderness straddling the international border. The plateau’s rim feeds the 88-meter Catarata Arco Iris and other major waterfalls, among them Catarata Federico Ahlfeld, El Encanto, and Salto Susana, which plunge from its edge into the Amazon lowlands below.

British Colonel Percy Fawcett surveyed this border country between 1908 and 1910 while marking the Bolivia-Brazil boundary, and after a Royal Geographical Society lecture in London on 13 February 1911, the cliffs and isolated highlands he described are widely credited with inspiring Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World, in which prehistoric creatures survive atop an unscalable South American plateau. In the memoir later published as Exploration Fawcett, the colonel wrote that monsters from the dawn of life might still roam such heights, imprisoned and protected by unscalable cliffs. Today the plateau remains nearly as remote as Fawcett found it, reached only by light aircraft, multi-day overland expedition, or river, with no roads crossing its surface and only scattered ranger stations across its vast interior.

Noel Kempff Mercado sits at the meeting point of four major South American ecosystems: the Amazon rainforest, the Brazilian Cerrado, the Chiquitano dry forest, and seasonally flooded savannas resembling the Pantanal. This convergence supports an extraordinary 620 or more bird species, around 140 mammals, 74 reptiles, 62 amphibians, 254 fish, and an estimated 4,000 vascular plants, roughly 2,700 of them already documented. Conservation International’s 1991 rapid biological assessment alone turned up 26 plants, one mammal, and three reptiles new to science, and surveys continue to add to the list. The mix of river systems, gallery forests, oxbow lakes, palm stands, and high Cerrado makes for one of the richest single-park biodiversity inventories in tropical America.

Among its flagship birds is the harpy eagle, the western hemisphere’s most powerful raptor, which still hunts monkeys and sloths in the canopy. Below it, jaguars are unusually abundant, with single guided trips routinely yielding several sightings alongside puma, ocelot, margay, jaguarundi, giant anteater, lowland tapir, marsh deer, pampas deer, and the elusive maned wolf. Family groups of giant otter patrol the oxbow lakes, pink river dolphins surface in the Iténez and Paraguá, and nine species of macaw, among them the spectacular hyacinth, fly above the gallery forests. Black caiman, anaconda, and bushmaster sit at the top of the reptile fauna. Few places on Earth pack this much intact predator-prey life, freshwater diversity, and birdlife into a single protected area.

The park was created on 28 June 1979 as Parque Nacional Huanchaca and renamed in 1988 to honor the Bolivian biologist Noel Kempff Mercado. On 5 September 1986, Kempff, founder of the Santa Cruz natural history museum that now bears his name, landed his small aircraft at an airstrip on the Huanchaca Plateau with pilot Juan Cochamanidis and guide Franklin Parada. They had stumbled upon what proved to be the largest cocaine-refining laboratory in Bolivia at the time. All three were murdered by the traffickers; only the Spanish scientist Vicente Castelló escaped, hiding for a day in the forest before signaling a rescue plane. The killings shocked Bolivia, accelerated counter-narcotics reforms, and gave a new name to the wilderness Kempff had spent his life cataloguing.

In 2000 the park was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its exceptional habitat diversity, its viable populations of large vertebrates, and a geological record spanning more than a billion years. From 1996, the Noel Kempff Mercado Climate Action Project, led by Bolivia’s government with The Nature Conservancy and Fundación Amigos de la Naturaleza, retired more than 500,000 hectares of logging concessions and folded them into the park, roughly doubling its size to 1.52 million hectares and pioneering one of the world’s first verified forest-carbon projects, though its claimed emissions savings were later revised sharply downward. The park remains under-resourced and pressured by recurring fires, recorded in 2010, 2019, 2022, and 2024, by illegal logging, and by clandestine cocaine labs, which makes every legitimate visit a small contribution to its protection.