🇵🇪 Peru · The Amazon (Jungle)
Reserva Nacional Tambopata is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet and the great magnet of southern Peru's jungle. It protects some 274,690 hectares of Amazon rainforest in the Madre de Dios region, around the Tambopata and Madre de Dios rivers, and you reach it through Puerto Maldonado, its gateway. This is a destination for immersing yourself in the Amazon: walking through the forest, navigating the rivers, sleeping to the chorus of nocturnal wildlife and marvelling at the colors of the macaws.
Its numbers are record-breaking: the reserve is home to hundreds of bird species, more than a hundred mammals -including cats such as the jaguar, the puma and the ocelot- and an astonishing number of butterflies, considered one of the largest concentrations of its kind in the world. The stars of the show are the collpas, clay walls where at dawn flocks of macaws and parrots gather, and the cochas or oxbow lakes that shelter giant otters, caimans and water birds. In short, a paradise for nature lovers.
Visiting Tambopata means staying at a jungle lodge reached by boat from Puerto Maldonado, and giving it at least two or three nights to make the most of the guided excursions. The best time is the dry season, with less rain and more wildlife activity. Bring light quick-dry clothing, strong repellent, rain gear, a flashlight and binoculars, and get informed about vaccines and prevention of tropical diseases. The reserve is managed by SERNANP and is always visited with operators and guides.
Reserva Nacional Tambopata was created to protect the ecosystems and exceptional biodiversity of the southern jungle of Madre de Dios, together with Parque Nacional Bahuaja-Sonene, with which it forms a large conservation corridor. Managed by SERNANP, it combines nature protection with sustainable tourism and the use of resources by local communities such as Infierno. It faces threats such as illegal gold mining in its surroundings. More detail on the 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.
In southeastern Peru, in the Madre de Dios region, Reserva Nacional Tambopata protects a fragment of what is probably one of the most alive corners of the planet. Across some 274,690 hectares of tropical rainforest, around the Tambopata and Madre de Dios rivers, it concentrates a biodiversity that leaves scientists and travelers alike lost for words.
The figures speak for themselves. Tambopata is home to hundreds of bird species, more than a hundred mammals -including cats such as the jaguar, the puma and the ocelot- and one of the largest concentrations of butterflies recorded in the world, with more than a thousand species identified within a few square kilometers. Add to that reptiles, amphibians, fish and countless plants and insects, many still to be studied.
Among all its attractions, two stand out: the collpas and the cochas. The collpas are clay walls where, at dawn, flocks of macaws and parrots gather to eat mineral mud, in an unforgettable display of color. The cochas -horseshoe-shaped lakes such as Lago Sandoval or Tres Chimbadas- are a refuge for giant otters, caimans and water birds. Tambopata is, in short, a sanctuary where life shows itself in all its exuberance.
Long before the legal figure of a 'national reserve' existed, the Tambopata river basin and its surroundings were the ancestral territory of the Ese Eja, one of the Indigenous peoples of the southern Amazon of Peru and Bolivia. Over generations the Ese Eja built a deep knowledge of the forest, its cycles, its medicinal plants and its wildlife, living from hunting, fishing, gathering and a shifting agriculture adapted to the Amazon ecosystem.
With the rubber boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Madre de Dios region went through a period of intensive exploitation and violence against Indigenous populations, who were displaced, enslaved or decimated by diseases brought from outside. That period left deep marks on the memory and on the territorial distribution of the Amazon peoples of the area, the Ese Eja among them.
In the following decades, various Ese Eja communities settled at specific points in the basin, among them the community of Infierno, on the Tambopata river, which in time would become a key player in the area's community tourism. When the Peruvian state created the protected areas of Tambopata and Bahuaja-Sonene in the 1990s and 2000s, it did so over a territory that already had ancestral owners, which produced a complex relationship between state conservation and Indigenous rights that continues today.
Formal protection of this jungle began in 1977, when the Peruvian state established the Zona Reservada de Tambopata, an initial area of little more than 5,000 hectares of lowland forest and palm swamps near the then newly founded Explorer's Inn, one of the first research and nature-tourism lodges in the Peruvian Amazon. It was a pioneering step: in those years, the idea of protecting Amazon rainforest for conservation and scientific research was still uncommon in Peru.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, Tambopata became a natural laboratory for biologists and naturalists from around the world, who documented its extraordinary diversity of birds, butterflies and other species, laying the scientific groundwork that would later justify greater protection. That research helped position the area as one of the most biodiverse spots recorded on the planet.
In 1990, in recognition of that richness, the protected area was expanded considerably to take in the basins of the Tambopata and Candamo rivers, reaching some 271,000 hectares. That was when the area came to be called Reserva Nacional Tambopata, setting the name and much of the boundaries we know today.
Definitive National Reserve status came on September 4, 2000, when Supreme Decree No. 048-2000-AG formally declared Reserva Nacional Tambopata with the extent and category it keeps today: some 274,690 hectares managed by the Servicio Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas por el Estado (SERNANP), the body created to run Peru's system of protected areas.
A few years earlier, on July 17, 1996, the Peruvian state had created the neighboring Parque Nacional Bahuaja-Sonene, an even larger stretch of jungle and wet savannahs south of Tambopata, on the border with Bolivia. Together, Tambopata and Bahuaja-Sonene form a conservation corridor of extraordinary size, protecting a gradient of Amazon ecosystems from terra firme forest to the flooded savannahs (the Heath plains), a refuge for species as singular as the marsh deer.
This combination of categories -national reserve (which allows some sustainable use of resources) and national park (strict protection)- reflects a layered conservation strategy, where local communities, Infierno among them, can develop tourism and controlled use in the reserve, while the national park preserves intact the most pristine nature in the region.
Since its declaration, Reserva Nacional Tambopata has developed a management model that combines protection of nature with sustainable tourism and responsible use of resources by local communities. A notable example is the native community of Infierno, of the Ese Eja people, which has taken an active part in ecotourism and forest management projects since the 1990s, in partnership with private operators, and from whose surroundings many of the boat trips to the reserve's lodges set out.
This model showed that Amazon populations can be protagonists and direct beneficiaries of conservation -through jobs, a share in tourism management and royalties- instead of being left on the sidelines of the business their own territory generates. Tambopata thus became a regional benchmark for community nature tourism, drawing researchers, volunteers and travelers from all over the world since the 1990s.
Tambopata and all of Madre de Dios, however, face serious threats today. The main one is illegal gold mining, advancing in areas around the reserve and along the La Pampa mining corridor, causing severe deforestation and heavy mercury contamination in the rivers and in the food chain. Add to that illegal logging and the pressure to open new roads into previously inaccessible areas. The reserve has become a front line where tourism, science and conservation hold out against increasingly organized pressures. Visiting responsibly, with serious operators committed to the community and the environment, is also a way of supporting the defense of this natural treasure.