SAN MARTÍN DE LOS LLANOS, Colombia — The llanos region spans more than 200,000 square miles through Colombia and Venezuela. Hot winds blow over its grassy hills, and scattered forests of Mauritius palms shelter hidden streams and lagoons. For centuries, this landscape, shaped by ancient rivers, has been shared by ranchers and cattle, which learned to coexist with jaguars, panthers, anacondas, electric eels and crocodiles.
In December, Colombia declared a new national park in a corner of the llanos that borders the Manacacías River. The Manacacías joins the larger Meta River; then the Orinoco River, which forms part of the border with Venezuela; and there feeds into a tributary of the Amazon. At 263 square miles, the new Parque Nacional Natural Serranía de Manacacías is not Colombia’s biggest. But from a conservation perspective, it is strategic, protecting a crucial link between this vast tropical savanna and the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest.
The Manacacías park is six hours from the nearest town, San Martín. To reach the park, one must navigate unmarked roads across an undulating sea of green prairie grass, seldom seeing another vehicle. Cellphone signals die as the sky widens and the ubiquitous zebu cattle grow sparse.
On a ride into the nascent park in late November, just days before it was legally declared, Thomas Walschburger, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy in Colombia, explained why it was needed so urgently.
Cattle rearing, the traditional livelihood of the region and one that was easier on its rivers and soils, was giving way to a new agricultural frontier. Fields of African oil palms, and white-trunked eucalyptus trees, were encroaching ever closer to the park’s boundaries.
The sandy, acidic, nutrient-poor soils of the llanos can support these commercial crops only when doused with fertilizers and calcium carbonate. But intensive agriculture compromises the water, and the ability to sustain life, in a key transition zone between the llanos and the Amazon. The hope is that by protecting this small puzzle piece of savanna, a whole lot more can be saved.
The park has been in the works since 2010, when the Colombian government recognized the llanos, long viewed by the public as grassy wastelands, to be a conservation priority. A rare and fortuitous alignment of science, philanthropy and a new carbon tax allowed Manacacías to take shape, slowly and carefully, over more than a decade. During that time, a whole community had to be persuaded that it was worthwhile.
Farewell to a Family Legacy
Hato Palmeras, the Rey family ranch, sits close to the Manacacías River, in the southern part of the park, surrounded by a panoramic view of prairie. Founded in the early 1950s, the ranch and its 25,000 acres of natural grasslands, palm forests and wetlands have never been touched by a tractor.
On a November afternoon, Ernesto Rey, 68, prepared to drive hundreds of his cows out of the park’s limits, never to return. The ranch would soon be turned over to the Colombian government, and the farmhouse converted to a ranger station.
Colombia put up about $20 million for the park, using funds from a fossil fuel tax and environmental impact compensation payments from industry.
A consortium of nonprofit groups, including the Nature Conservancy, Re:wild, the Wyss Foundation and others, joined forces to help, raising more than $5 million toward the purchase of lands. Much of the seed money came from the sale of a single artwork donated by Carol Bove, an American sculptor, through a nonprofit called Art into Acres.
The World Wildlife Fund, which also supported the park’s creation, hired lawyers and topographers to manage sales of ranches such as Hato Palmeras. One lawyer, Lorena Torres, had traveled to the ranch from Colombia’s capital, and was spending the night. Final payment on the Rey ranch was tied to the exodus of most of its livestock, which Torres would document.
William Zorro, the new park’s director, had also come to see the Rey cows leave. The lawyers, park people and conservationists were not there to monitor the ranchers, Zorro insisted, but to accompany them. The atmosphere was convivial, as everyone knew one another well.
Zorro, 51, had spent more than 20 years directing different national parks in Colombia, some of them in conflict zones. As a result, his diplomatic skills were well honed. Not everyone living within the boundaries of the park was as cooperative as the Rey family; some ranchers would not vacate until they absolutely had to. Zorro tried to be as flexible as he could with them. He would give them time before he and his team began dismantling the corrals that allowed people to rear cattle here.
Another challenge Zorro faced was that people came to these lands from the surrounding community to hunt and fish, activities soon to be prohibited. “Llaneros love to hunt,” he said. “It’s something we have to work on.”
He hoped to welcome tourists to the park one day, but the more immediate concern was getting the community to accept it, and its rules. For two years, Zorro’s team, including a sociologist and several newly minted rangers, had promoted the park and its mission to residents of San Martín.
Of Caracaras and Oncillas
It was early afternoon; the big cattle drive would start the next day. At his long farmhouse table, Ernesto Rey ate a lunch of beef liver with his cowboys, deploying a rich vocabulary of curses at them in a gravelly voice while cutting his meat with the knife from his belt. The cowboys were laughing. “He has a noble heart,” his nephew Oscar Rey said.
Unlike his brothers, who were eager to get out of ranching, Ernesto Rey was reluctant to sell at first. His parents built this rustic farmhouse, with its long wood-burning stove, antlers used as hat hooks and mango tree where the cowboys sat playing a ukulelelike instrument called a cuatro. Save for a period in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when right-wing paramilitaries invaded the llanos and extorted landowners like him, Rey’s memories here were good ones. “How can I not still love the farm where I’ve spent my whole life?” he said.
Instead of opting for a quiet retirement in town, as his family hoped, Rey would remain a cattleman: He had rented another ranch a four-day journey away. All morning, he and the cowboys had been working furiously to separate out any pregnant and nursing cows that were unlikely to make it safely to the new property. The cowboys would come back for them later.
As they drank their coffee, the smell of smoke drifted in. Not far away, prairie grass was burning. The new park hadn’t yet been signed into law, and a neighboring family had decided to burn a few acres, hoping for some fresh shoots to feed their cows before they, too, had to leave.
Walschburger, the Nature Conservancy scientist, went out to get a closer look. At the fire’s frontier, flames crackled loudly as grass turned to spaghetti strings of ash. Walschburger stepped right through them as savanna hawks and caracaras, two common birds of prey on the llanos, swooped excitedly over the smoldering pasture, hunting escaping rodents and reptiles. Maneuvering around termite mounds as tall as he was, Walschburger made his way toward a stand of Mauritius palms that had been deliberately spared the burning; whoever lit this fire knew exactly what they were doing, he said.
Burning and grazing had shaped the ecosystem of the llanos for centuries. Both would soon be illegal here. The scientists and park officials weren’t sure how to think about this.
Tapirs, deer and other wild mammals liked fresh green prairie grass as much as cows did. Without burning, would the landscape grow so brushy that it would not be able to feed as many of them? Would the same large populations of migratory birds, such as the flycatchers that sailed gracefully all over these open hills, continue to thrive if the tree cover increased? Which plants and animals would profit here, and which would suffer, without constant human intervention?
Walschburger pointed to a startling sight on the ground: the severed head of a woodpecker. Just a few feet away, in the mud where grasslands gave way to palm forest and shallow lakes, was the paw print of an oncilla, a cat that is smaller than a puma or jaguar. The trails of anacondas could be seen everywhere, the wet grass flattened by the snakes’ heavy bodies as they moved from lagoon to lagoon.
Domesticated pigs had also been part of this landscape since anyone could remember; they ate the fruits that the Mauritius palms dropped, while the anacondas ate their babies. Within weeks, the pigs, like the rest of the farm animals within the bounds of the park, would be gone, and the whole trophic system would change.
Walschburger estimated that the park could support up to 20 pairs of jaguars. Scientists in Bogotá were hoping that captive-bred Orinoco crocodiles, a native species hunted to near-extinction in the 1940s and ’50s, could soon be reintroduced into its waterways.
“It will be interesting to see what all this looks like in five, then 10, then 20 years,” Walschburger said. For now, he was just glad that Manacacías existed. Colombia had experienced an ambitious spate of national park-building in the 1970s and ’80s, but mining, big agriculture and armed groups made new ones ever harder to establish. Walschburger, along with many of his colleagues, felt that Manacacías, Colombia’s 61st national park, would most likely be its last.
Old Times, New Times
The 16th-century town of San Martín, where the park has its offices, is home to a singular cattle-centric culture, and to a staunch traditionalism.
Even the local music reflects this. Llanera songs are cowboy songs, the star instrument of which is the harp, played fast and hard. Ana Veydó, a singer and the leader of the group Cimmarón, based in San Martín, is the rare female artist testing the limits of the genre, with piercing ballads that evoke the region’s nature and history. Although Cimmarón has been nominated for a Grammy Award and performs regularly abroad, it receives few invitations at home. “We want to showcase the great diversity” of llanos culture, Veydó said. “I don’t think the institutions like that.”
Every Nov. 11, on the feast day of its patron saint, San Martín erupts in a wild spectacle that has occurred almost uninterrupted since 1735. Teams of horsemen dressed as Spanish, Moorish, African and Indigenous warriors engage in mock battles with spears and lances. The costumes of the cachaceros, representing Africans, are phantasmagoric confections of old jaguar pelts, caiman skulls and peccary teeth. Each horseman inherits his role from an older male relative, making the cuadrillas, as the battles are called, the domain of just a few families.
Ernesto Rey has ridden in the cuadrillas since 1970 as a Galán, or Spaniard. Since his early teens, his nephew Oscar Rey has done the same.
The younger Rey, now 44, worked on the family ranch for much of his life. He was there a decade ago, when teams of biologists and geologists from Colombia’s Universidad Nacional came to conduct the meticulous surveys that would form the scientific evidence for the Manacacías park. In 2022, he greeted the country’s then-environment minister when he arrived by helicopter to see it for himself. By then, the Reys had committed to selling Hato Palmeras to the government. And Oscar Rey, rather than inherit his share of it, had become a park ranger.
In many ways, he said of the llanos, “it’s like old times here.” His family ranch has always been owned and run by men; his grandfather left nothing to his daughters. But a younger generation no longer wanted to work on huge, isolated cattle ranches, he said. They wanted to study, find jobs with oil companies or agricultural firms, or move. They sought relationships that were more like partnerships, without the strict gender roles typical of the ranches. With fair offers for their properties, and few interested heirs, most landowning families were willing to sell.
The Manacacías park, Rey said, would accelerate the cultural changes already underway.
“You’re going from people coming here to hunt, to fish, to the idea of conservation,” he said. “My colleagues and I are doing environmental education workshops in schools, talking to kids. Some of our new rangers are women. What does all this mean? Right now, this landscape is all about the men who own the ranches. But if you’re looking at it as a place of conservation, a place for the public, it’s not necessarily so male-dominated.”
‘We’re Like Pioneers Here’
Ernesto Rey and his cowboys awoke in their hammocks before dawn, to the percussive harps of llanera music on their phones and Jupiter visible in the sky. After a breakfast of beef bones in broth — no one seems to eat anything but beef in the llanos — they grabbed their soft-brimmed topochero hats and took off on their horses in a chorus of high-pitched hollers and whips cracking. A pink sunrise turned to yellow as Rey rode behind the herd in shirt sleeves, chasing wayward cows.
Within two hours, they and 300 cows would cross a river and leave the park’s limits, but their journey to the rented farm was just starting. For three nights, they would rely on the hospitality of the owners of other far-flung ranches.
The park workers and conservationists left Hato Palmeras soon afterward, headed for a northeastern sector where the new rangers were stationed.
That morning, along the improvised roads that crisscrossed the plains, wild animals were out in force. Bushy-tailed giant anteaters galloped in the dewy grass. A tamandua, or collared anteater, with prizefighter arms and curved claws that break open termite mounds, tried to ignore a car full of onlookers.
The rangers occupied an emptied-out ranch with limited electricity, no internet and no refrigerator; their fresh food was stored in foam coolers. The way it worked, a group of three rangers stayed in the house for two weeks at a time, and then returned to their base in San Martín, replaced by different colleagues. Several times a week, they made the rounds of the park together on motorcycles that their boss, Zorro, borrowed for them.
They were mostly young, poorly paid and all alone. As not even dogs can be kept in Colombia’s national parks, their sole pet was a chicken left behind by its former owners. “We’re like pioneers here,” said Alexandra Rubio, 21, who, with her colleagues, had been working in these bare-bones conditions for months. They would have to put up with the conditions a while longer, Zorro said. Once the park was officially declared and had a definite budget, things would start to improve.
Already, though, the rangers had made a difference. They had established the government’s presence in a formerly anything-goes region. Thanks to their outreach in San Martín, they had been invited in November to march in the annual parade celebrating the cuadrillas. Zorro thought that the invitation was a turning point for the park, a moment of acceptance. And on their motorcycle patrols through Manacacías, the rangers had logged some important wildlife sightings.
Gustavo Castro, one of the rangers staying on the ranch that week, had been standing at a lookout a few months earlier when he noticed something brown and furry ambling in the tall grass. “I got closer to him, maybe 5 or 6 meters, and he carried on normally,” Castro said. “I was able to get some good videos and photos.” The animal was a bush dog, a wild canine thought to be extinct in the area.
To Walschburger, the verified sighting of a bush dog was exciting. Bush dogs were more common in the Amazon, suggesting that the wilderness corridor between Manacacías and the Amazon basin was active. The bush dog’s documented use of the area could potentially result in stronger protection for that corridor, which looked, on a satellite map, like a curved finger of green extending southeast. The more data coming from the park, Walschburger said, the greater the conservation possibilities in and around it.
The llanos can be disorienting — German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who explored the Orinoco region in 1800, complained of their “infinite monotony” — but after months of patrols, the new rangers navigated the terrain with ease. Their phones were now full of oncillas, tapirs, great horned owls and the gleaming crowns of Mauritius palms at sunset.
Oscar Rey joined his colleagues as they stopped at a bend of the Manacacías River. The rangers frequently checked in on this sandy shoreline, as people routinely placed fishing nets across it. Rey had known it since he was a boy, when his grandfather taught him to shuffle as he walked barefoot in the water to avoid being stung by rays.
Everywhere around him were tracks made by tapirs, peccaries, capybaras and lizards. It was almost the time of year when freshwater turtles dug nests in the riverbanks, he said. Rey’s grandparents ate their eggs, of course, but future generations would not.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2024 The New York Times
