Area:                      19,000,000 hectares
Habitat Type:           Freshwater wetland
Location:                 Mainly in the State of Mato Grosso, Brazil
Base City:               Cuiabá, Brazil

Starting only a 75 minute drive from Cuiabá, the Pantanal is world famous for wildlife viewing and is the planet’s largest continuous freshwater wetland system. The Pantanal covers 19,000,000 hectares of habitat, 10 times larger than the Everglades, and is fed by the Paraguay River. The Transpantaneira is the only all year route running into the area. The actual park itself, the Parque Nacional do Pantanal Matogrossense includes 135,000 ha of habitat with the rest of the Pantanal being privately owned. Along with some smaller privately owned reserves, the park was recognised a UNESCO world heritage site in 2000.

The concentration of flora and fauna on the wetlands is spectacular and world renowned. This is due to the annual floods from tropical rains feeding the giant nursery of life. The area is home to around 230 types of fish, 80 species of mammal, including jaguar, capybara, giant ant eater, giant otter, and giant armadillo; 650 species of bird such as the toucan and blue macaw, and 50 different types of reptile, such as anaconda and caiman, and then thousands of different butterflies. The concentration of wildlife is thought to be the highest in the Americas, which is why the area is referred to as an ecological paradise. Some species hard to spot in the Amazon can be found here in abundance. Additionally, the Pantanal is an important migration route for many species of bird.

To visit the Pantanal, you can stay at either the Pantanal Wildlife Center or the Jaguar Research Center.  This area harbours 4,000-7,000 jaguars, including the heaviest specimens in the world. A male jaguar in this region region recently weighed in at 310 pounds (144 kilos). The Jaguar Research Center offers specially trained trackers and boatmen who have shown jaguars to guests 397 times in 220 guest days in the 2007 and 2008 dry seasons (July through October). At the Jaguar Research Center we visit the “Meeting of the Waters State Park”, one of the three largest protected areas in the entire Pantanal. No other location in the world offers as higher chance of seeing wild jaguars. The Jaguar Research Center now has both a complete face dossier of the 15 most frequently-seen cats and a growing number of data points that allow us to map the overlapping territories of these magnificent animals.