In the northeast of Bolivia’s Santa Cruz Department, close to the Brazilian border, Noel Kempff Mercado National Park protects a landscape that does not fit a single postcard image of the Amazon. UNESCO lists the property at 1,523,446 hectares, with elevations from about 200 metres to nearly 1,000 metres. Instead of one continuous-looking wall of rainforest, visitors encounter a broad ecological mosaic: evergreen Amazonian forest, palm forest, wetlands, gallery forest, savannah, semi-deciduous dry forest and Cerrado. The park’s scale is difficult to grasp from a map; it is a remote, extensive conservation area, not a compact attraction with a simple circuit.
The terrain’s variety is also a record of deep time. UNESCO describes the park’s evolutionary history as reaching back more than a billion years, to Precambrian geological formations. On the Huanchaca Meseta, Cerrado habitats have remained isolated for millions of years. That long separation makes the plateau significant not only for its scenery but as a natural setting in which researchers can study the development of ecosystems. The story here is therefore geological as well as biological: ancient rock, altitude and isolation have helped shape neighbouring environments that differ sharply over relatively short distances.