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Magazine Articles

Colombia’s Heartland

The country’s newest national park preserves a unique prairie system that connects the Andes mountains with the Orinoco and Amazon Rivers.

Text by Matt Jenkins | Photographs by Federico Rios Escobar | Issue 3, 2024

Stormclouds hover over undulating savanna hills.
Headwaters The undulating savannas in Colombia’s new Manacacías national park become wetlands during the rainy season. © Federico Rios Escobar

From the eastern edge of the northern Andes mountains, a vast expanse of tropical grassland and savanna stretches across Colombia and Venezuela, northeast toward the Caribbean. This is the 220,000-square-mile Llanos—a remote and sparsely populated, yet richly textured landscape. It can be a harsh world, with months of heavy rainfall followed by periods of searing drought.

It is also the cradle of the independent, rugged Llanero culture, a ranching tradition that—while reminiscent of Argentina’s gaucho cattle culture—is distinct, with its own style of music and deep connections to the local landscape. In the early 1800s, the hard-riding Llaneros played a critical role as cavalry units in helping revolutionary Simón Bolívar in the battles that eventually toppled Spanish control in South America.

A map shows the new Manacacias National Park.
Joint Effort The national park protects about 168,000 acres. TNC and its partners are now working with local ranches to create a wild buffer zone. © Mapping Specialists
Gustavo Guarín stands near a hanging saddle.
Led by a Local Gustavo Guarín was a cowboy but now works as a guide at the new park. © Federico Rios Escobar

In more recent times, the region’s history has been entangled in Colombia’s complicated politics. In the 1980s and 1990s, many ranches were extorted or taken over by guerrillas and paramilitaries, and parts of the region served as a cocaine-processing center, a key link between the heart of coca production, just to the south, and markets far to the north.

But as the Llanos has emerged from its turbulent history, it has gained attention for an entirely different set of connections. One area in particular, known as the Serranía de Manacacías, caught the attention of scientists. The hilly, rolling landscape there is home to 13 separate ecosystems, many of which were not previously represented in Colombia’s national park system. Eight are associated with the savanna. But nestled between the folds of the land, along streams and wetlands, are five riparian forest, or “bosque,” ecosystems—emerald-green ribbons that provide relief and refuge amid the broader dry savanna landscape.

Roughly a decade ago, scientists recognized the Serranía de Manacacías’ importance not just as a unique ecosystem with extremely high biodiversity, but also as an ecological bridge—both within Colombia and to points beyond.

A river cuts through a grassland with a forest in the background.
With the Flow The park is dotted with lagoons, wetlands and rivers. © Federico Rios Escobar
a woodpecker on a tree.
Lineated Woodpecker © Federico Rios Escobar

“Manacacías is unique because it has nearly 460 bird species. That’s one-third of the avian biodiversity of the U.S., in just 168,000 acres,” says Thomas Walschburger, The Nature Conservancy’s senior science advisor in Colombia. Manacacías serves as a link between two major river basins, the Orinoco and the Amazon, as well as the Andes. “It’s a very important biodiversity corridor, and it’s important for a lot of migratory birds from the U.S. There may be 50 species of boreal migrants,” including buff-breasted sandpipers, Mississippi kites, bobolinks and a variety of warblers.

Yet even as scientists’ awareness of the ecological importance of the Serranía de Manacacías was growing, so were threats to the area. In recent years, the region has seen a burst of oil-palm cultivation, plantation forestry, and oil and gas exploration.

“A lot of people think the Llanos will be the new agro-industrial frontier of the world,” says Walschburger. “Because in our [traditional] mentality, grasslands have no value. If you say savannas, that’s wasteland.”

But last November, after a decade of discussion and an ongoing series of ranch buyouts, the Colombian government declared this the newest area within Colombia’s national parks system.

Llaneros gather near a ranch fence.
Llaneros The region’s distinct culture of ranching and cowboys are locally referred to as the Llaneros. © Federico Rios Escobar
Adults and children parade in traditional clothing.
Ties to Tradition Residents of San Martin de Los Llanos, the town nearest Manacacías, celebrate their ancestry, which includes a mix of Indigenous people, Spaniards, Arabs and enslaved people. © Federico Rios Escobar

A long, bumpy road to Colombia’s newest national park

William Zorro, a 25-year-veteran of Colombia’s national Natural Parks agency, now is in charge of the new Serranía de Manacacías National Natural Park. “It’s really a special place,” he says. “The ranching culture here has traditionally co-existed with the native wildlife and the environment, so it was a very well-conserved landscape. That’s one of the reasons that we decided to establish a park here and start buying ranches.”

Under a shift in Colombian government policy that’s now nearly a decade old, new protected areas can only be established after consultation with, and the agreement of, the people who live in the area to be designated. And at least 80% of private properties within a park area have to be purchased before creating the park. Those requirements posed new challenges in the Serranía de Manacacías, the first place in which creating a new national park meant buying out the property rights of landowners within the proposed park.

Red-bellied macaws perch among palm fronds.
Wild Side The savannas and forests of this area sustain incredible biodiversity. The long list of identified species includes red-bellied macaws. © Federico Rios Escobar
Squirrel monkeys cling to a tree branch.
Squirrel monkeys © Federico Rios Escobar

Decisions to sell were partially propelled by broader changes happening on the Llanos. During the 1980s and ’90s, “there was a lot of violence in the Llanos,” says Walschburger. “A lot of landowners fled, so the new generation was raised in the urban areas, and they administered their ranches from the cities.”

Because of that, he says, “the new generations don’t have as strong a relation to the land. We have lost all these arraigamientos a la tierra—those connections to the land.”

At approximately 168,000 acres, the new park is about one-fifth the size of Yosemite National Park. “It’s small for a park, but everything you can see condensed in one place is phenomenal,” says Javier Rodríguez, a local rancher. “It’s a landscape that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, with a very high degree of biodiversity.”

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The negotiation process to create the park, which involved striking agreements with 37 families with ranch properties inside the park’s boundaries, took half a decade. The final price tag totaled roughly $25 million, with some of the money coming from funds the Colombian government raised through a tax on fossil fuels—the first time government funds have been used for this purpose in Colombiaas well as funding from the Wyss Foundation and the Art into Acres program. A consortium of conservation groups, including TNC, Re:Wild, World Wide Fund for Nature-Colombia and the Wildlife Conservation Society-Colombia, also provided support for the effort.

“The process was very difficult,” Walschburger says. “But I think it was also a really innovative way to create a new national park in Colombia.”

Zorro has been head of five other national parks in Colombia, many of which were protected decades ago. For him, Manacacías is different. “Being involved in the entire process of establishing a park—and then getting to manage it into the future—is something really special,” he says.

For now, the parks department is slowly ramping up its presence on the landscape, mainly in the form of guardaparques, rangers who do two- to three-week deployments in the park under austere conditions. The park is a seven-hour drive from the nearest town, and the rangers’ primary method of communication with the outside world is via Starlink satellite, using batteries that hold only two hours of charge per day.

a giant anteater moves through tall grass.
Giant anteater © Federico Rios Escobar

But Walschburger and others are already turning their eyes outside the park. They’re thinking about a much larger, half-million-acre landscape as a “conservation mosaic,” a larger-scale patchwork of protection that extends beyond the park. That’s largely because even with the designation of the park, threats from palm oil, forestry and potential tar sands oil production continue to grow, and habitat connectivity over large areas is important not just for birds but also for other animals, including large cats such as jaguars, pumas and ocelots.

Zorro hopes that the collaborative process that led to the creation of the park will help spur a wider-ranging dialogue about other, private conservation strategies—particularly on working ranches—that can complement the government-led effort and expand the possibilities for conservation in Colombia.

“The government itself doesn’t have that many resources, so without the involvement of others, real conservation is going to be impossible,” says Zorro. “We all have to work together.”

A boa constrictor dangles from a tree limb.
Boa constrictor © Federico Rios Escobar

The Nature Conservancy and its partners in the area are ramping up existing efforts to support ranchers in land management practices that help their operations become more profitable while also protecting—or restoring—grasslands and other wildlands on their properties. Some of the possibilities include regenerative practices to make ranching more profitable, ecotourism and possibly carbon markets to add economic value to grasslands and forested lands.

The goal is to keep the region’s Llaneros on their ranches and create a border of healthy lands surrounding the national park.

“Basically, the challenge is to keep ranching economically competitive so it isn’t displaced by other uses of the land” such as oil palm plantations and tree farms, says Rodríguez, who continues to ranch in the area outside the park. “Individualism,” he adds with a laugh, “is a big thing here, and working together isn’t always so easy. Going forward, we have a lot to learn.”

About the Creators

Federico Rios Escobar is a Colombian photojournalist who focuses on social issues in Latin America, including political unrest and the lives of refugees.

Matt Jenkins is a writer and former Nature Conservancy magazine editor who has written for The New York Times, Smithsonian and other publications.