About Parque Nacional das Emas (ICMBio-Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodivers
The great open savanna of the CerradoThe Parque Nacional das Emas protects 132,000 hectares of the Cerrado, the vast tropical savanna of central Brazil, in the southwest of the state of Goiás. From the air it is a landscape of grassland and gallery forest stretching flat to the horizon — one of the last large blocks of pristine Cerrado, a biome that has been cleared faster than almost any other in Brazil for soy and cattle. Creation and recognitionThe park was created on 11 January 1961. In 2001 UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site as part of the "Cerrado Protected Areas", together with the Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park — a recognition of the two parks as strongholds of the biodiversity of a biome that holds a large share of South America's plant and animal species. Wildlife and a natural spectacleEmas is one of the best places in Brazil to see the large fauna of the Cerrado. It shelters the giant anteater (tamanduá-bandeira), the maned wolf (lobo-guará), pampas and marsh deer, and both jaguar and puma, along with some 400 bird species — close to half of the birds recorded in the whole Cerrado — including the greater rhea, the ema that gives the park its name.The park is also famous for a rarer spectacle: its termite mounds, which in the wet season glow with the cold green light of the larvae of a click beetle that lives in their outer walls and lures prey with bioluminescence. Seen at night, the plain lights up with thousands of points of green — a phenomenon protected here in one of the few places it is known to occur.