Travel to Amboro National Park

Amboró National Park occupies one of the most remarkable geographic positions in South America. It lies at the Elbow of the Andes, where the continent’s great mountain spine bends westward toward Peru. The strictly protected park covers 4,425 square kilometers, or 442,500 hectares, and together with its surrounding management area the protected complex reaches 637,600 hectares. Here three of the continent’s major biomes meet: the Amazon Basin, the Andean Yungas, and the Gran Chaco lowlands. Few places on Earth bring three such different worlds together, and the result is a mosaic of habitats that shifts from steaming tropical jungle to misty cloud forest to dry highland scrub within a single day’s trek.

The result is extraordinary biological richness. With nearly 3,000 documented plant species, more than the entire British Isles in an area many times smaller, Amboró ranks among the most botanically rich protected areas in South America. Its vegetation types read like an encyclopedia: lowland rainforest, cloud forest, palm forest, tree-fern groves, cactus scrub, tropical Yungas, montane scrubland, and open pampas. Because of the park’s rugged terrain and lack of roads, much of it has never been surveyed, and biologists are confident that species still await discovery in Amboró’s remotest valleys, where new records continue to be added.