Things to do in the Pantanal Brazil
The South American country’s UNESCO-listed wetlands have an astonishing diversity of wildlife that rivals the Amazon’s.
Roberto Klabin cannot remember seeing a jaguar when he was a child, even though his family has ranched in the Pantanal since 1952. When he was growing up, the 67-year-old says, all that mattered in southwestern Brazil was cattle farming. There were no roads; when his family travelled to their estancia, they would go by rail, then truck, then horse. There were no tourists; the few who came to Brazil visited Rio or the Amazon rainforest. And there was no talk of preserving the landscape for wildlife.
As I fly for an hour on a little prop plane from Campo Grande to Klabin’s bush homestead, Casa Caiman, in the southernmost Pantanal wetlands, it seems extraordinary this vast area is not a national reserve but is privately owned. Like the Serengeti in Africa, the Pantanal is in a vast geographical depression. Its 20 million hectares cover Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia and are fringed by mountains and floored with grasslands dotted with islands of trees. In the rainy season it becomes the world’s biggest floodplain, teeming with birdlife – and mosquitoes.
In May, when I fly across it, after devastating fires in 2019 and the worst drought in almost a century, the area looks more like the African savanna than a wetland. From the air, I see a crescent of red sandstone cliffs dropping into dense green scrub. A muddy river wiggles across the landscape, occasionally spilling into an oxbow lake. And then there is nothing but hundreds of kilometres of flat, dry landscape, cattle enclosures and eucalyptus forests, grassland dotted with glinting waterholes, huge rectangles of scrub.
Unlike Africa, there are no animals to see from the air, other than cattle. Then we land the plane alongside the forest, disturbing two giant rheas (South American ostriches) that scatter into the grass, and my enthusiastic young guide, Pedro de Almeida, tunes in to his safari radio for a wildlife update. “If you don’t mind doing a detour to the lodge,” he says, encouraging me to climb aboard his safari truck, “I think we have something to show you.”
Given I am in Brazil to see wildlife, I do not mind at all, particularly when, 10 minutes down the road, I train my binoculars beside a pond and there, licking a paw, is a jaguar with a playful three-month-old cub.
To see a jaguar in the wild is far more thrilling than seeing a lion in Africa. For a start, the South American cat is elusive. With only about 15,000 left in the wild, fewer than were killed annually in the 1960s for their prized fur, they are wary of humans. Their habitat is dense forest. And, unlike lions, jaguars live alone. To see this female with a cub is particularly special, Pedro yelled at me with a grin, because none of her previous offspring has survived.
That we can sit here for half an hour, our binoculars trained on the giant cat’s fat white belly, flicking tail and distinctive black rosettes, is in large part thanks to the conservation efforts of Klabin. Having witnessed the partnership between conservation groups and cattle farms used in Africa to protect landscapes, while employing communities, he decided to do something similar. When he inherited a 53,000ha section of his family’s estate in 1983, he decided to create the Pantanal’s first ecological reserve. In 1988 he opened his first lodgings to wildlife tourists and, in 2011, the Brazilian wildlife organisation Oncafari based its Brazilian headquarters on his farm to research jaguars.
This May, having persuaded nine other nearby farms to join him in creating a giant ecological corridor of 300,000ha, he opened Casa Caiman’s newly refurbished lodge, created by combining an old guesthouse and his family’s homestead. This is complemented by two villas with five and six bedrooms apiece for private groups.
Arriving at Casa Caiman, I feel an immediate sense of calm. The 18-suite terracotta-tiled estancia overlooks a lake, and from the open-sided veranda guests are watching birds through binoculars. A cool dining room is laid out with a delicious buffet-style spread, and an airy contemporary living room is decorated with wildlife photography. There is a swimming pool surrounded by landscaped gardens, and Adirondack chairs set around fire pits for sundowners.
Most importantly, though, Klabin has invested in expert naturalists to immerse guests in the natural riches of the Pantanal. With my guide Pedro and Claudio Jose do Nascimento, a naturalist who has worked here since 2005, I spend two days being dazzled by the miraculous fauna and flora. The remote UNESCO-protected biosphere has, I soon learn, a far greater diversity of life than the Amazon, and is home to more than 2000 species of plant and 500 kinds of bird, as well as 124 types of mammal.
Which is why wherever we go, there is something to see. In the mornings, out on horseback or on game drives, flocks of parrots and parakeets flit above our heads, including scores of luminous-blue hyacinth macaws, protected by a local project that has helped to grow the population of these endangered birds to 6000 over 30 years. There are sand-snakes and slender caimans, giant capybaras and iridescent hummingbirds, thickets of pink trumpet flowers and islands of exotic palms. It’s an astonishingly abundant landscape in an ocean of farms.
Part of the reason creatures are flocking here, Klabin says, is not only because he has set aside 5000ha of forest purely for animals, but because there is water. Both resources are disappearing elsewhere thanks to large-scale soy farms and diverted rivers above the Pantanal. That is why he helped to found the NGO SOS Pantanal, to find sustainable ways to save it.
“If soy farms come to the Pantanal, which is the big threat now, it will be game over. So we need to get people here to see the extraordinary natural world we have,” he says. “People go to India to see tigers, and South Africa to see leopards, and we should be as well known for jaguars.” In 2012 in this area, an Oncafari researcher tells me, “there were 35 jaguar sightings. But in 2021 we had 1075, which means 99 per cent of visitors saw one”.
Over three nights at Casa Caiman, I am what Pedro calls “the luckiest guest we’ve had”, seeing not only three jaguars, but scores of other animals. By torchlight, we see two ocelots and a puma. Just outside the camp, I watch a long-haired giant anteater catching termites on its sticky pink tongue; I track a prehistoric-looking armadillo scuttling between anthills; and almost step on the glistening gold and black torso of a resting 3m anaconda, and then a very hairy, hand-sized tarantula. And I am constantly glued to my binoculars, admiring birds that live here, such as snake-hunting owls and giant-eyed nightjars, pretty pink pigeons and toucans.
Flying on to my next stop, Pousada Trijuncao in the Cerrado, a tropical savanna region that covers 200 million hectares, I am struck not only by how huge the country is (transfers to airports can take five hours) but how hemmed in these wild areas are by agriculture. From the air, flat farmland stretches to the horizon, mainly growing soya to feed cattle in China. Yet, not long ago, says my guide Luciano Lima, the area was wild. So fast is it changing, with more than half of the Cerrado deforested in 40 years (about 20 million hectares a year from 2002 to 2008), that the most biodiverse savanna on the planet is now more threatened than the Amazon.
Which explains why Trijuncao’s owner, the philanthropist media billionaire Jose Roberto Marinho, bought the 33,000ha property: to save it. Unlike the Pantanal, this northeast area of Brazil is dry, so you do not come here for animals (although, apparently, it is home to armadillos, tapirs, anteaters, an occasional rare black jaguar and 13 maned wolves, one of which we briefly see). What you come here for is the wilderness; to view the thick, heavy twirls of the Milky Way without a glimmer of artificial light; to walk quietly along sandy roads, stopping to admire weird and wonderful plants; to watch the sunrise as rare songbirds flit between flowers, and tiny gremlin-faced marmosets nibble at bark. Or, if you’re feeling brave (which I am), to swim in a peaty lake, praying the only caimans in residence are the endemic “dwarf” species I was able to see by torchlight the previous night.
It is also a place, given the chef’s cooking skills, in which you could overindulge. Trijuncao is situated at the juncture of three Brazilian states, and the chef has taken inspiration from them all. At breakfast there is coconut rice pudding and tiny cheesy eclair-like balls to resist, and later rich shrimp stew and thick slabs of butter-soft beef. And considering the comfort and style of the lodge, it is rather tempting to hang out, literally, in hammocks in the almost ryokan-style wooden living areas, or beside the little pool or, when temperatures plummet, in the log-cabin sauna.
Mostly, though, I spend my days learning from Lima. Known as “Brazil’s Bird Boy” because of his extraordinary avian knowledge at the age of only 13, the now 37-year-old naturalist is at Pousada Trijuncao training the already well-educated young guides. There does not seem to be a thing he does not know, from the dangers of African bees to the songs of birds, some so rare, he says, “most twitchers would be having an orgasm if they saw what’s in front of you right now”.
I love watching his multifarious feathered friends fly about. But the thrill for me is seeing vast swathes of our planet left untouched, and witnessing the effect that serious investments in nature can have. That Joro Experiences, the operator that organised my trip, offset my carbon and invests proceeds from the trip via its Conscious Travel Foundation into Brazilian projects, is the cherry on top, making it a dream trip that just keeps giving.
In the know
Joro Experiences offers packages with 14 nights’ full board, including flights, stays in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, excursions and transfers, some on private planes. Price on inquiry.
Lisa Grainger was a guest of Joro Experiences.
THE TIMES
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