🇦🇷 Argentina · Litoral y Mesopotamia
The Esteros del Iberá are one of the largest wetlands in the world: an inland sea of fresh water, lagoons, floodplains, grasslands and embalsados (floating islands of vegetation) covering an enormous stretch of north-central Corrientes province. The name comes from Guaraní and is usually translated as 'shining water' or 'bright waters', and one look at the sky reflected on the lagoon at dawn is enough to see why.
The great draw is the wildlife, abundant and remarkably unbothered by visitors. On a single boat or canoe outing it's normal to see caimans sunning themselves, capybara families, marsh deer among the reeds, howler monkeys in the trees and dozens of birds: herons, storks, jacanas, kingfishers. The Iberá also protects emblematic species and, thanks to an ambitious rewilding project, animals that had disappeared have come back to the wetland, such as the giant anteater, the pampas deer, the red-and-green macaw and even the jaguar.
The tourist gateway par excellence is Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, on the shore of the Iberá lagoon. It's a quiet settlement of sand streets, with no great urban comforts, made for switching off: charming inns, local guides and a slow rhythm set by the early morning outings and the fall of the sun, when the wildlife is most active. Getting there means a good stretch of gravel from Mercedes, part of the charm and the adventure of visiting this still uncrowded place.
After centuries of ranching use and severe poaching that almost emptied the wetland of wildlife, the Esteros del Iberá took a historic turn: the purchase of estancias and the later donation of land driven by Douglas and Kristine Tompkins (through The Conservation Land Trust, today Fundación Rewilding Argentina) made it possible to create Iberá National Park in 2018 and to launch a species reintroduction program that brought the jaguar back to Corrientes. That story, with its stages and its protagonists, is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Founded in 1588 as San Juan de Vera de las Siete Corrientes, it is the most Guaraní and most federalist province in Argentina: cradle of chamamé, declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, setting of the outbreak of the War of the Triple Alliance and home of the Esteros del Iberá, where the jaguar roars again after seventy years.
Read the history of Corrientes →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
In January 2021, a female jaguar named Mariua stepped out of an enclosure on a remote island in Corrientes with her two cubs and set foot on the grassland: it was the first free-ranging jaguar in the province in seventy years. That moment, filmed by the biologists' cameras, crowned one of the most extraordinary conservation stories on the planet, and its setting was this sea of fresh water the Guaraní called 'shining water'. The Esteros del Iberá are one of the largest freshwater wetlands in the world and the second largest in South America, after the Pantanal. They cover an enormous stretch of north-central Corrientes province, in the Argentine Litoral: a giant mosaic of lagoons, marshes, floodplains, grasslands and embalsados — those floating islands of vegetation that drift on the wind and the current. It's a system fed basically by rainwater, with no great rivers crossing it, which makes it a very particular environment with clean water.
This labyrinth of water and reeds works as an extraordinary refuge of biodiversity. Caimans, capybaras, marsh deer, howler monkeys, the maned wolf and hundreds of bird species live there together. For a long time it was an isolated region, hard to reach, inhabited by Corrientes settlers who lived off extensive ranching, fishing and, in harder times, hunting its wildlife. That isolation, paradoxically, helped preserve the place, but it also left it exposed to the poaching that decimated many of its species through the 20th century.
The name Iberá comes from Guaraní, the language of the indigenous peoples who lived in this part of the Litoral and which is still very much alive in Corrientes culture. The most widely known and accepted translation is 'shining water' or 'bright waters', sometimes also given as 'glittering water'. The word is usually broken down into the Guaraní roots associated with water (y) and with what shines or gleams (berá).
It's a deeply descriptive name: anyone who has seen the surface of the Iberá lagoon at dawn or dusk, when the sun reflects off the sheet of water and the floating mats, understands at once why the Guaraní named it that way. Unlike other disputed place names, in the case of Iberá there is fair consensus about its meaning tied to the shine of the water, even if the various spellings and translations vary slightly from source to source.
For much of the 20th century, the Esteros del Iberá suffered intense pressure on their wildlife. Commercial hunting and poaching of caimans for their hides, of capybaras, marsh deer and other species, together with the conversion of land for ranching, pushed several animals to the brink of local disappearance. Some emblematic species, such as the giant anteater, the pampas deer, the red-and-green macaw, the tapir, the collared peccary and the jaguar itself, ended up extinct inside the wetland.
The first great step towards protection came in 1983, when Corrientes province declared the Iberá Nature Reserve, an enormous provincial reserve of hundreds of thousands of hectares. Later, in 2002, the Esteros were recognized as a Wetland of International Importance under the Ramsar Convention. Those designations put a brake on some practices, but something more ambitious was still missing: not just protecting what was left, but recovering what had been lost and giving the marshes back the wildlife that had disappeared.
The decisive turn in the modern history of the Iberá came through the American businessman and conservationist Douglas Tompkins — founder of brands such as The North Face and Esprit — together with his wife Kristine McDivitt Tompkins. In the late 1990s, around 1997, through his foundation The Conservation Land Trust (CLT), they began buying old cattle estancias inside and around the marshes, starting with land in the heart of the wetland.
Over the following years, the foundation acquired around 150,000 hectares of former estancias. On that land it removed the livestock and the internal fencing, let the native vegetation recover and set up an environmental restoration program. The ultimate aim wasn't to keep the land but to donate it to the Argentine state so it would become a national park under strict conservation, adding those hectares to the large provincial reserve that already existed. Douglas Tompkins died in 2015 in an accident in Chilean Patagonia, but his wife Kristine and the foundation team carried the project through.
The soul of the Iberá project is rewilding, that is, the reintroduction of species that had gone locally extinct in order to restore the whole ecosystem, including its large herbivores and predators. In 2007, The Conservation Land Trust (later renamed Fundación Rewilding Argentina) released the first giant anteater at the Rincón del Socorro reserve, near Colonia Carlos Pellegrini. That species was followed in later years by the pampas deer, the collared peccary (around 2015), the red-and-green macaw (with birds released in the Cambyretá core area), the tapir and the giant otter.
The most ambitious and symbolic piece was the return of the jaguar, the largest cat in the Americas, which had disappeared from Corrientes almost seven decades earlier. To achieve it, a Jaguar Reintroduction Center was built on an island in the middle of the marshes, where animals were raised and prepared until they could be released. In 2021 the first jaguars were released into the Gran Parque Iberá, and in time cubs began to be born in the wild. Today the estimated population is several dozen wild jaguars in the Corrientes ecosystem, and tourists and rangers have even managed to film animals born in the wild near Carlos Pellegrini. The Iberá thus became one of the great global symbols of wildlife restoration.
The donation process was formalized from 2015-2016, when the foundation handed its land over to the state, and culminated in 2018, the year the national Congress passed the law creating Iberá National Park. In this way the hectares donated by Tompkins Conservation and Rewilding Argentina (around 150,000-195,000 hectares) were added to the hundreds of thousands of hectares of the Iberá Provincial Reserve to form the so-called Gran Parque Iberá, one of the largest protected areas in the country.
Beyond conservation, the project bet on a development model based on nature tourism as the economic engine for the towns of the area, known as 'nature production'. Small places such as Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, previously dependent on ranching, found in local guides, inns and photo safaris a new source of work and a reason to look after the wildlife rather than hunt it. Today the Iberá is an emblematic destination of Argentine ecotourism and an example cited worldwide of how to recover an ecosystem and, at the same time, give its people a future.