The Parque Nacional do Iguaçu protects 169,695 hectares of subtropical rainforest on the border between Brazil and Argentina, and with it one of the most spectacular sets of waterfalls on earth. From the air the scene is singular: an almost unbroken green plateau of Atlantic Forest split by the dark line of the Iguaçu river, which suddenly plunges over a great curved escarpment in a line of cataracts kilometres wide.
The park was created on 10 January 1939, during the government of Getúlio Vargas, making it one of the oldest national parks in Brazil. On 17 November 1986 UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site. Directly across the river the Parque Nacional Iguazú in Argentina, itself World Heritage, protects the other bank; together the two parks safeguard a continuous natural area of some 250,000 hectares — one of the largest surviving blocks of a forest that once covered much of eastern South America and now remains on less than a tenth of its original range in Brazil.