Iberá Wetlands in Argentina: A Wildlife Story of Hope and Return

For most of the twentieth century, the Esteros del Iberá were working land. Cattle grazed the higher ground, and the marsh itself was a hunting ground for hides and meat. Jaguars were shot as threats to livestock until there were none left in Corrientes; the last are generally thought to have disappeared around the middle of the century. Giant anteaters, giant river otters, pampas deer, collared peccaries and red-and-green macaws went the same way, some vanishing from the province entirely. What remained was a marsh that still looked wild from a distance but had lost most of its large mammals and many of the species that shaped it.

Protection came in stages. In 1982 the province of Corrientes created the Iberá Provincial Reserve, about 13,000 square kilometres in all, which made it one of the largest protected areas in the country. A reserve on paper, however, does not bring back an animal that is no longer there.

The decisive change began in the late 1990s, when the American conservationists Douglas and Kristine Tompkins started buying estancias around the marsh through their Conservation Land Trust. Douglas Tompkins had co-founded the outdoor brand The North Face and later the fashion label Esprit; Kristine Tompkins had been chief executive of Patagonia. Together they turned their fortunes towards buying land in Chile and Argentina, restoring it and handing it back to the state as public parks.

In Iberá that meant years of removing cattle, closing drainage channels and letting grassland recover. It also meant persuading a province where the Tompkins name was not universally welcome that a park could pay its way. Douglas Tompkins died in a kayaking accident in Chilean Patagonia in 2015, the same year that land in Iberá was formally donated to Argentina. In December 2018 Congress created Iberá National Park on that donated land, and the national park now adjoins the Iberá Provincial Park. Together they form one of the largest protected areas in Argentina, often promoted under the name Gran Parque Iberá.

The rewilding work in the Iberá Wetlands is now run by the foundation Rewilding Argentina, which grew out of the Tompkins conservation teams, in partnership with the provincial government and the national parks administration. The approach is slow and practical. Animals are sourced from zoos, rescue centres and other countries, held in large enclosures on site while they adjust, then released and tracked by radio collar.

The first species to return were giant anteaters in 2007. The early animals were mostly orphans rescued in northern Argentina, raised by hand and released in small numbers. Many people doubted the idea at the time, and some of the first releases failed. The programme persisted, and the anteaters bred, and the success became the template for everything that followed. More than a hundred giant anteaters have since been released, and their offspring now forage freely across the grasslands.

Pampas deer came next, then collared peccaries, then birds. Red-and-green macaws, gone from Corrientes for well over a century, were raised in aviaries and released into the forest islands, where their raucous flights are once again part of the morning. Bare-faced curassows and ocelots followed. Giant river otters, the noisy, social fish-eaters that had been wiped out across most of Argentina, were among the hardest to bring back; a family of otters born in Iberá to zoo-bred parents was released in 2025.

The jaguar project has always been the headline. A large predator is the hardest sell in any rewilding scheme, because neighbours fear for their cattle and because a single jaguar needs an enormous territory. Rewilding Argentina built a breeding centre on San Alonso, an island in the middle of the marsh, and brought in cats from zoos and rescue centres in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.

In 2018 a female named Tania gave birth to two cubs at the breeding centre, the first jaguars born in Iberá in around seventy years. Releases into the wild began in 2021, and in 2022 one of those cubs, now an adult called Arami, gave birth to cubs of her own in the open marsh. They were the first wild-born jaguars in Corrientes for roughly seven decades. The number of free-living jaguars in Iberá has continued to climb since then, and the cats have begun doing what top predators do: changing where capybaras feed, where caimans bask and how deer move across open ground.

Visitors should not expect to see one.

Jaguars are wary and largely nocturnal, and they range over huge areas. The point, for most people who come, is knowing the animal is out there.

What the marsh does offer, generously and at close range, is everything else. Capybaras, the world’s largest rodents, graze in family groups on the lawns of guesthouses. Marsh deer, big and reddish with dark legs, wade through shallow water. Two caiman species bask on the banks, and howler monkeys call from the forest patches at dawn. More than 350 bird species have been recorded in the region, among them jabirus, roseate spoonbills, several kingfishers and the greater rhea, the largest bird on the continent, which stalks the drier grassland like a grey, flightless ostrich.

Boat trips are the classic outing. Guides push out into the lagoons early, cut the engine near the floating islands and let the animals come into view. Kayaking is quieter still. On horseback, riders follow the local style of holding the reins in one hand and wade through knee-deep water and reeds, a way of moving through the marsh that the gauchos of Corrientes have used for generations. It sounds like a postcard activity. It is actually a surprisingly good way to approach birds, which pay far less attention to a horse than to a person on foot.

The Iberá story is as much about people as animals. The towns around the marsh are small, and their economies were built on cattle, forestry and rice. Corrientes has a strong Guaraní heritage, still heard in place names and everyday speech, and a gaucho culture of horsemanship, chamamé music and long afternoons of mate. The case made by the park’s promoters was simple: wildlife could be worth more alive than dead, and visitors who came to see it would spend money locally.

That argument has been tested on the ground. Former hunters and ranch hands now work as rangers and guides, and some local families run guesthouses or rent horses. Jaguars, once shot on sight, appear on town murals and in the marketing of the province. It is an uneven change, and not every ranch neighbour is convinced, but it has made Iberá a frequently cited example of rewilding that tries to include the people who live alongside it, much as smaller community projects such as the Finca Bellavista tree-house settlement in Costa Rica build a way of life around the forest rather than against it.

Reaching the Iberá Wetlands, Argentina’s interior marsh country, takes time. There is no airport beside the marsh. Most people fly from Buenos Aires to Posadas or to the city of Corrientes and continue by road, and long-distance buses run from the capital for those with a day to spare. The last part of the trip is often on dirt roads that turn slick after rain.

Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, on the shore of Laguna Iberá on the eastern side, is the established base, with lodges, guides and a visitor centre. The western side is quieter. Concepción, a small grid of dusty streets around a central square, sits within easy reach of the marsh and has guesthouses, a campsite and local guides offering boat, kayak and horse trips. Other access points, known locally as portals, have opened around the park in recent years, each with its own trails or boardwalks.

A sensible minimum is two full days: one on the water, one on horseback or foot. Visitors who stay longer tend to slow down to the pace of the place, which is set by the light rather than the clock.

The Iberá Wetlands Argentina protects today look much as they did a century ago from a distance. Up close, they are different. Anteaters cross the tracks at dusk, macaws argue in the treetops, and somewhere in the reeds a jaguar is moving through territory its species had not held for generations. Few places offer such a clear view of what happens when people decide to put back what they took out. For photographers drawn to wild animals in open country, it sits comfortably alongside the free-roaming horses of Patagonia as one of the great wildlife stories of South America, and like the remote highlands of Chin State in Myanmar it rewards travellers prepared to spend a day getting there.

On the way out, bring insect repellent for the summer months, a light waterproof for the boats, and binoculars, because the most memorable animal of the trip is usually the one at the far edge of the lagoon. More wildlife and nature pieces are collected under stories.