The region's name derives from the Portuguese word for swamp. And that’s basically what the Pantanal is, albeit a supersized one.
Sitting Sphinx-like on the riverbank,
the young male jaguar was less than 10 meters away from where I perched at the front of our boat. As our eyes locked, I felt a rush of fear mixed with marvel that something could be so beautiful and dangerous at the same time. It was a weird sensation, being so close to a creature that wouldn’t have thought twice about having me for dinner. A clump of lily pads and a narrow stretch of murky water lay between us, but nothing the big cat couldn’t have leaped in a single bound.
That’s what makes the Pantanal wetlands of west-central Brazil so special—the chance for up-close encounters with wild animals. And not just jaguars, mind you, but also giant river otters, anteaters, howler and capuchin monkeys, tapirs, capybaras, caiman crocodiles, and the thousand different bird species that call this vast floodplain home. The Amazon to the north may have the reputation for being
the place for wildlife in South America. But as my veteran guide Judy Drunha explains, “There are many animals in the Amazon, but you only hear them, rarely spot them, because the vegetation is just too thick. The Pantanal is much more open country. You can actually see the wildlife, and so many different kinds.”
The name of the region derives from pântano, the Portuguese word for swamp. And that’s basically what the Pantanal is, albeit a supersized one. During the seasonal flooding of the Paraguay River system from November to March, the plains are transformed into a seemingly endless web of interconnected swamps, lakes, lagoons, and channels that effectively cuts the Pantanal off from the rest of Brazil. Various sources call it the world’s largest tropical wetland or largest network of contiguous wetlands. Either way, it’s a huge expanse, spilling over into neighboring Paraguay and Bolivia across an area almost as large as Great Britain.
That’s an awful lot of water and wildlife. But not an awful lot of humans. Only about 30,000 people live in the Pantanal heartland year-round, mostly on the hundreds of isolated fazendas (cattle ranches) situated around the periphery of the swamps. The deeper you venture into the wetlands, the fewer people you come across, until you reach a point where mankind seems to have made little if any impact. Which is remarkable, given that so little of the Pantanal falls within the boundaries of national parks or wildlife preserves. Nearly all of it is privately owned, mostly by cattle ranching families who’ve lived in the region for generations. In fact, it is the deep connection between the ranchers and nature— and the ranchers’ stubborn resistance to outsiders trying to exploit their land—that likely spared the Pantanal from the environmental destruction that has ravaged so much of the Amazon. From Campo Grande, a city
of about one million people that serves as the gateway to the southern Pantanal, it took almost seven hours along increasingly rough dirt roads to reach my first destination. Founded in 1940 by the parents of the current owner, Baía das Pedras is a working cattle ranch that does double duty as a farm-hotel. It’s very much a family affair, as well as a great place to soak in the pioneering spirit of the region.
“When I was a child in the ’60s, my father used to take an oxcart once a year to get supplies from the nearest town, 180 kilometers away,” Rita Coelho Lima recalled as we sat on the porch of her ranch house that first evening. “It took a week to get there and 20 days to get back. They built all of this themselves, my mother and father— this house, the corrals, even the road you drove in on today.”
Although she had four older brothers, Rita was expected to contribute her fair share while growing up at Baía das Pedras. “I learned all the cowboy skills,” she said proudly. “How to ride, how to rope, how to brand. And I can run a cattle drive if need be.”
The discovery of gold in the highlands around the Pantanal attracted a wave of settlers in the 1720s. When the yellow metal ran out, most of the prospectors trickled back to the coast. But a hardy few decided the empty grasslands were ripe for cattle ranching. Over the centuries, a distinct Pantaneiro cowboy culture evolved, a lifestyle that revolves around cattle and horses. “Our horses have special adaptations,” Rita related. “They can stand in water a week or a month at a time and their feet don’t get disease. They can stick their heads into the water and eat submerged grass. No other horses in the world are like that.”
Although most of the hands at Baía das Pedras are young and transient, a few have been around for nearly as long as the ranch itself. Sebastião Ramão, his skin burnished and tough as leather, has worked here since he was a teenager in the 1950s. Semi-retired these days, he still lives in a cottage near the horse corrals.
“We had lots of fun in the old days,” Ramão told me. “Whenever we castrated the cattle, we had a big fiesta. Beer, food, lasso competi-