Noel Kempff Mercado National Park

Noel Kempff Mercado National Park is located in the province of José Miguel de Velasco in the department of Santa Cruz, in eastern Bolivia on the border with Brazil. The park has an area of 15,838 km2, making it one of the largest parks in the entire Amazon basin. In 2000, the park was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The park was named after the famous Dr. Noel Kempff Mercado, who devoted his life to exploring nature and studying the history of the reserve.

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General Information

The main relief-forming element of the park is the Caparo Plateau, settled on the hard crystalline surface of the Brazilian Shield. The altitudes within the plateau’s boundaries range from 200 meters and almost up to 1000 meters. This explains the considerable landscape diversity of the Noel-Kempff-Mercado Park: from wooded savannahs, referred to here as “campos cerrado”, to evergreen mountainous Amazonian forests.

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The natural boundary of the park is the Rio de Iteneca River, also called Guaporí, which flows east and north of the country and separates the park from neighboring Brazil. As an integral part of the park, the Guaporí River is a prime example of its biological uniqueness: of its 250 fish species, 25 are endemic.

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The rivers in the park form waterfalls along their entire course – at hard rock outcrops. The most famous is the Arcoiris Falls (meaning “rainbow” in Spanish), located on the Pauserna River. Its height is 88 meters, and the width of the flow of falling water reaches up to 50 meters. The name fully justifies itself: here and indeed over the waterfall in the afternoon you can observe a bright rainbow for quite a long time. Like other attractions of the park, the waterfall is not easy to get to: it takes 10-12 days of travel by pirogues.

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Climate

The temperature in the national park area varies little throughout the year, but during the dry season (roughly May through September) can drop to +10°C when cold and dry air masses called “surazos” come from Patagonia. The Caparu Plateau serves as a natural barrier to the humid air masses, receives heavy rainfall and over the last three thousand years has seen a shrinking of savannahs and an increase in rainforests.

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However, global climate change has already slowed this process: especially tall trees have become more prone to wilting, droughts bring forest fires, and many endemic species of fauna and flora are on the verge of extinction.

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History

The first acquaintance of Europeans with the lands that now form the Noel-Kempff-Mercado National Park occurred in 1908. At that time, a British archaeologist and traveler, Lieutenant Colonel Percival Harrison Fawcett (1867-1925), managed to pass through the jungle of the future park with his expedition. After him, this route was not traveled until 70 years later, when geologists explored the rocky landforms of the crystalline shield in Bolivia. At that time the first maps of these wilderness areas were also made.

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The expedition’s work caught the attention of Bolivian biologist and naturalist Noel Kempff Mercado (1924-1986), who began to promote the need to preserve Bolivia’s jungles. On June 28, 1979, a national park was created, which was already named after Noel Kempff Mercado in 1988. The naturalist had died two years earlier, in 1986. Then he and several other explorers, making an expedition, came across a cocaine factory in the Bolivian jungle. The drug traffickers, not wanting to be exposed, killed Mercado.

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Flora and fauna

The entire plant diversity of the park is dominated by vascular plants: bromeliads, passionflower (Passiflora), heliconia, aroids (Aronnaceae), and palms. There are so many species that hardly half of them have been described to date, and others have not even been named.

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The fauna of Noel-Kempff-Mercado National Park is as diverse as the flora. Typical inhabitants of the park are such rare species as the river otter, river dolphin, tapir, spider monkey (koat and howler monkey), giant armadillo (armadillo), giant (three-toed, large) anteater, and jaguar. Of the birds, the most famous is the mako parrot, and of the reptiles, the black caiman. The extermination of the black caiman has a negative impact on the ecosystem of tropical areas, in the rivers of which the number of piranhas increases greatly.

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Amphibians occupy a special place in the biosystem of the Noel-Kempff-Mercado National Park. There is no greater diversity of amphibian species than in this national park anywhere else in South America: there are 127 of them, and the number of species studied may increase in the near future. They live mainly along the border with Brazil, in the north of Bolivia. About half of them belong to species characteristic of the Amazon. Almost all of them are threatened with total extinction, including the yellow and green anaconda, whose meat is highly prized by many Indian tribes, the yellow spotted river turtle, the coal (red-footed) turtle, the chapara turtle, and the giant Brazilian turtle (also known as the toothed, forest or chabuti). There are about 254 species of fish in the rivers.

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Noel-Kempff-Mercado National Park is of particular value to science and mankind because of the fact that nature has remained untouched here. There are no large and valuable mineral deposits here. The economy is reduced to serving a small number of tourists and explorers. At one time – in the 1980s – they tried to conduct logging here, but quickly abandoned it, because it was simply impossible to remove the forest: the rivers are shallow and rapids, there are no roads at all, except for Indian hunting trails.

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National Park Conservancy

Noel-Kempff-Mercado National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, meeting the following criteria:

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a) the site is an outstanding example of ongoing ecological or biological processes in the evolution and development of ecosystems, plant and animal communities;

b) the site includes the most important or significant natural habitat for the conservation of biological diversity within it, including endangered species of exceptional global value.

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One of the reasons Noel-Kempff-Mercado National Park was honored to be inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List was the fact that it preserves the largest areas of the cerrado (Portuguese for “closed”, “inaccessible”, “isolated”), a tropical savanna ecoregion characteristic of Brazil. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the Cerrado is the most biologically diverse savanna in the world. The Cerrado in the Noel Kempff-Mercado National Park has escaped the fate of other savannas in Brazil that have been affected by human activity: it was common to burn the savannas to grow monocultures of soybeans and sugarcane.

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Only the pampas deer, swamp deer, grizzled wolf (guara, aguarachay), and common nandu have survived in the cerrado.

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Interesting facts

  • English writer Arthur Conan Doyle is believed to have written his novel “The Lost World” while being impressed by the diaries and photographs of Percival Fawcett, an explorer of the area.
  • A typical inhabitant of the rivers in the park is the ternecia, of the freshwater fishes of the characin family, very popular with aquarists. Ternecia can change coloration when deteriorating conditions. When frightened, the body of the fish acquires a silvery-dirty shade.
  • Strassicolor (Passiflora) has medicinal properties and is used in folk medicine: the plant, known as “bat”, Indians use to treat liver disease.
  • The spider monkey koat lives in the upper tiers of tropical rainforests, at a height of 25-30 meters, and rarely comes down to the ground. Its tail is so tenacious that the monkey with its help can not only hang from branches, but also pick up various objects with it. Howler monkey got its name for the terrible timbre of its voice, thanks to which it can parody all the animals in the jungle, from the pig to the jaguar.
  • The giant armadillo is the largest in its troop: its body length is 75100 cm and its weight is 18-32 kg. It has up to 100 directed back teeth, and this is the largest number of teeth among land mammals. The large claws on its forelimbs, especially on the third toe, reach up to 20 cm in length and are considered one of the longest claws in the animal world.”
  • The giant anteater throws out its 60-centimeter-long tongue at a rate of 160 times per minute, preying on 30,000 insects in a day.
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  • The longest individual green anaconda was 11.43 meters long. Currently, the largest known anaconda is about Amy’s length weighing about 130 kg and is kept at the New York Zoological Society.
    • In 2013, a coal turtle (a member of a rare and little-studied species) was found in Brazil and was thought to have been missing for 30 years. It had been living in a pantry and was presumably feeding on termites.
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Tourists

There are 2 entrances for visitors: the Flor de Oro on the north side of the park and Los Fierros on the south.

Address

Bolivia, 600 kilometers east of the town of Santa Cruz on the border with Brazil.