Latin America and the Caribbean
From Mexico to Argentina, WCS’s Latin America and Caribbean program uses a landscape-scale approach to conserve the habitats of the region’s penguins, pumas, monkeys, guanacos, and other iconic wildlife. Our conservationists work on the ground to protect Latin America’s most ecologically intact wild places, including the rugged coastlines of the Southern Cone, the rainforests of the Amazon basin, and grasslands of the Andean steppe. Encompassing productive fisheries, biological corridors, migratory flyways, carbon sinks, sustainable development reserves, and more, these landscapes are not only vital to Latin America’s biodiversity but to its people and economies as well.
Featured Landscapes
The biggest park in Chile and one of the world’s major freshwater reserves, this rugged area of glaciers and fjords is home to eagles and condors.
Covering nearly 7 percent of Nicaragua, this reserve helps protect the largest piece of tropical moist forest north of Amazonia.
This relatively undeveloped lowland is the world’s largest expanse of protected dry forest and a haven for jaguars and peccaries.
A gift by Goldman Sachs helped to establish this reserve in Patagonia, a mix of peat bogs, woodlands, and snowy mountains.
Five protected areas, eight indigenous territories, and archeological sites dot this huge rainforest and montane wilderness.
The largest Brazilian protected area for the flooded forest, this region is home to river dolphins, uakari monkeys, and jaguars.
This rainforest is a stronghold for jaguars, pumas, scarlet macaws, howler monkeys, and millions of migratory birds.
One of Earth’s most sparsely populated regions, this land is the last stronghold of the guanaco, a wild relative of the llama.
Magellanic penguins, southern right whales, and elephant seals rely on this wild, remote expanse to feed and breed.
Vast swaths of intact tropical forests include seasonally flooded forests, which provide habitats for a great variety of wildlife.
This biosphere reserve was created in 1998 to protect the biggest concentration of wild vicuñas and other camelids in Argentina.
The Andean valley of the Cauca River boasts the country’s most fertile lands, which are under pressure from a growing population.
This swath of the Amazon has one of the world’s greatest varieties of trees and a record number of bat, bird, frog, and fish species.
Few places in the world rival the Yavari River and its seasonally flooded forests in the western Amazon Basin for sheer wildness.
At more than one million acres, this is one of the most extensive remnants of West Indian biodiversity left in the region.
From the Newsroom
A pair of courting cormorants soak up the sun in a newly minted marine protected area in Argentina. These seabirds share the Isla Pingüino Coastal Marine Park with sea lions, penguins, and dolphins.