Bolivia Guide
Santa Cruz and the Eastern Lowlands
Parque Nacional Noel Kempff Mercado
Occupying 16,000 square kilometres of Bolivia's far northeast, on the border with Brazil, PARQUE NACIONAL NOEL KEMPFF MERCADO is the most isolated, pristine and spectacular national park in the country, and one of the most remote wilderness regions in all South America. Encompassing a range of different ecosystems including different types of Amazon rainforest, dry and seasonally inundated savannah, and scrubby Brazilian cerrado, the park supports an astonishing range and abundance of wildlife, including over 630 species of birds (among them twenty different types of parrot and seven of macaw), as well as multicoloured tanagers and toucans, and such rarities as the mighty harpy eagle. In addition, eleven species of monkey inhabit the park, and all the major Amazonian mammals – including jaguar, tapir, peccary, deer, giant anteater and armadillo – roam its forests and savannahs, while its rivers and lakes are home to abundant pink freshwater dolphins and the highly endangered giant river otter. Of course, most of these species are also present in many of Bolivia's other national parks; the difference is that Noel Kempff Mercado is so comparatively undisturbed by human activity that your chances of actually seeing all these different animals are much higher here than anywhere else in the country.
The park's most remarkable natural feature is the Huanchaca plateau (also known as the Caparú Plateau), a vast sandstone meseta which rises 500m above the surrounding rainforest to an elevated plain of grasslands and dry cerrado woodlands, from where spectacular waterfalls plunge down the sheer escarpment into the park's rivers. This isolated plateau covers over seven thousand square kilometres, or a bit under half the park, and provided the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World – at least according to Colonel Percy Harrison Faucett, the legendary British explorer who was the first European to see the plateau when he came here in 1910 while demarcating Bolivia's borders, and who later described the landscape to Conan Doyle in London.