🇵🇪 Peru · The Amazon (Jungle)
Parque Nacional Bahuaja-Sonene is one of the largest and most biodiverse protected areas in Peru, in the southeast of the country between the regions of Madre de Dios and Puno, on the border with Bolivia. It protects an exceptional mosaic of ecosystems running from lowland Amazon rainforest to the wet Heath plains, a type of tropical savannah unique in Peru.
Its most singular feature is precisely those plains, or savannahs, home to wildlife found nowhere else in the country, such as the marsh deer and the maned wolf (aguará guazú). Add to that the immense richness of the rainforest: jaguars, pumas, monkeys, giant otters, caimans, spectacular birdlife and collpas (clay licks) where macaws and other animals gather. Together with the neighboring Reserva Nacional Tambopata, it forms a huge conservation corridor.
This guide covers the essentials of Parque Nacional Bahuaja-Sonene with a practical eye: how you get in (above all from Puerto Maldonado, along the Tambopata and Heath rivers), which ecosystems and wildlife make it unique, how to organize an expedition with authorized operators, real prices for fees and tours, and what to keep in mind in a remote, protected-nature destination. A park for anyone who loves deep wilderness and Amazon wildlife.
Parque Nacional Bahuaja-Sonene protects Amazon rainforest and Peru's only wet Heath plains, between Madre de Dios and Puno, on the border with Bolivia. Its name comes from Indigenous languages (the Tambopata/Bahuaja and Heath/Sonene rivers). It was established in 1996 and enlarged in 2000, taking in an area that, together with Bolivia's Madidi, forms an enormous binational conservation corridor. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The 'biodiversity capital of Peru': southern rainforest of rivers, oxbow lakes and clay licks, home to Manu and Tambopata, two of the richest wildlife sanctuaries in the world, today threatened by gold mining.
Read the history of Madre de Dios →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Parque Nacional Bahuaja-Sonene owes its name to the languages of the Indigenous peoples of the area, in particular the Ese Eja, who live in the Amazon region of southeastern Peru. 'Bahuaja' is the Indigenous name of the Tambopata river, and 'Sonene' that of the Heath river, the park's two great river axes. This naming recognizes the ancestral presence of the original peoples in the territory and their deep bond with the rivers and the forest.
The park spreads across a vast territory of 1,091,416 hectares between the regions of Madre de Dios and Puno, on the border with Bolivia, running from lowland Amazon rainforest up to the Andean foothills. Its most singular feature is the Heath plains, wet tropical savannahs that are the only ecosystem of their kind in Peru, an open and exceptional landscape in the middle of the Amazon.
This range of environments —dense forest, flooded woodland, rivers, clay licks and savannah— explains the park's extraordinary biodiversity, which protects an enormous number of plant and animal species, several of them endemic, rare or endangered. The territory lies at the heart of one of the biologically richest regions on the planet, where the tropical Andes meet the Amazon plain.
Long before the park existed, the territory Bahuaja-Sonene protects today was, and still is, the home of the Ese Eja people (also called Huarayo), whose language belongs to the Tacanan family and whose name can be translated as 'people' or 'true people'. The Ese Eja have historically occupied the basins of the Tambopata and Madre de Dios rivers, and they made contact with Andean populations as far back as the Inca empire, possibly during the reigns of the Incas Sinchi Roca and Yahuar Huaca.
Contact with the Spanish began in 1567, with Maldonado's expedition to the upper Madre de Dios river. The deepest change, though, came at the end of the 19th century with the rubber boom: the mass arrival of migrants from Loreto, Ucayali, Bolivia and Brazil tied to the rubber trade drastically altered traditional settlement patterns, and several Ese Eja families had to leave their ancestral lands.
Today the Ese Eja live mainly in three native communities: Infierno, on the banks of the Bahuaja (Tambopata) river; Palma Real, on the Madre de Dios; and Sonene. Their culture keeps elements such as shamanism, central to their worldview, and a basketry tradition that Peru's Ministry of Culture declared Cultural Heritage of the Nation for its link to their ancestral territory. The park's name —Bahuaja-Sonene— is in itself a tribute to that age-old presence.
Protecting this territory answered the need to conserve unique ecosystems and exceptional biodiversity against the threats of deforestation, settlement and extractive activity. Parque Nacional Bahuaja-Sonene was officially established on 17 July 1996 and later enlarged in 2000, taking in new areas that reinforced its role as a great reservoir of nature in southeastern Peru.
The expansion brought in the Heath plains and better connected the park with other neighboring protected areas, forming an extensive conservation corridor. On the Peruvian side, the park borders the Reserva Nacional Tambopata, and on the Bolivian side it links up with Madidi National Park, one of the most biodiverse in Bolivia. Together, these areas form one of the largest continuous conservation spaces in the Amazon and the tropical Andes, essential for the survival of species that need large territories.
The park is managed by SERNANP, the national protected areas service. Its status as a national park means the highest level of protection: strict conservation of its ecosystems, where no resource extraction is allowed and entry is tightly regulated, largely for scientific research and controlled ecotourism.
Despite its top-level protected status, Bahuaja-Sonene has faced a serious and growing threat in recent decades: illegal gold mining. Organizations devoted to informal and illegal gold extraction have expanded their reach in Madre de Dios, closing in on Indigenous communities and protected areas such as the Reserva Nacional Tambopata, and pushing toward the park's own boundaries, particularly at the headwaters of the Malinowski river and in the buffer zone.
The environmental impact is severe: between 2019 and 2022, illegal mining deforested thousands of hectares of forest in Madre de Dios, with several hundred hectares affected inside and along the edges of Bahuaja-Sonene itself. The indiscriminate use of mercury to separate the gold contaminates rivers and streams, destroys fish habitats and directly affects flagship species of the park, such as the giant river otter, whose migration routes have been disrupted.
Tens of thousands of people are estimated to take part in artisanal mining, both formal and informal, in the Madre de Dios region, with thousands of rigs devoted to gold extraction. Those who mine inside protected areas face prison sentences and civil damages, but effective control across such a vast, remote region remains a huge challenge for the Peruvian authorities, who work alongside conservation organizations to halt the spread of this illegal activity.
Against these threats, responsible ecotourism and scientific research have become key tools for conserving Bahuaja-Sonene. The neighboring Reserva Nacional Tambopata, far more accessible from Puerto Maldonado, holds most of the lodges and tourist programs that let visitors see ecosystems similar to the park's, generating income that sustains conservation and local jobs, including for Ese Eja communities who take part directly in community tourism.
At the same time, Bahuaja-Sonene has been and remains a first-rate natural laboratory for scientists worldwide: its biodiversity records, especially for birds and butterflies, are among the highest on the planet for a protected area, and numerous expeditions and research institutions —such as the Frankfurt Zoological Society— work with SERNANP on monitoring endangered species and on strategies to counter illegal mining.
Bahuaja-Sonene is thus one of the great strongholds of Amazonian and Andean nature in Peru: a territory of incalculable scientific and cultural value, the ancestral home of the Ese Eja, today under heavy extractive pressure but also the focus of a sustained conservation effort that combines state protection, science and responsible tourism to secure its future.