Qualla: Campos Amazonicos National Park

Campos Amazonicos National Park: Introduction

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1914, Theodore Roosevelt emerged from the Brazilian jungle barely alive, ravaged by malaria, a leg infection, and near-starvation. The river that almost killed him -- formerly called the Rio da Duvida, the River of Doubt -- was renamed in his honor. Today the Roosevelt River flows south to north through the heart of the Campos Amazonicos National Park, a 961,318-hectare expanse spanning three Brazilian states. The park protects something that should not, by conventional logic, exist here at all: islands of savanna surrounded by dense Amazonian rainforest, ecological puzzles that scientists believe hold clues to the deep evolutionary history of the entire biome.

Campos Amazonicos National Park: Grasslands in the Wrong Place

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Amazon is synonymous with rainforest, so the patches of cerrado scattered through Campos Amazonicos are startling. These savanna enclaves -- grasslands, campos sujos (scrubby fields), and cerradao (dense woodland savanna) -- exist as relics of a drier climatic era, persisting...

Campos Amazonicos National Park: The River and Its Explorers

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Roosevelt River enters from the south, winding through flat terrain laced with slow meanders. The Jiparana (also called the Machado River) forms the park's southern boundary in Rondonia. Together with the headwaters of the dos Marmelos and Manicor rivers, these waterways defi...

Campos Amazonicos National Park: Rare Finds and Mixed Troops

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Few detailed studies of the park's flora and fauna have been completed, which is itself a telling fact -- the area remains that remote. But what researchers have found is compelling. The Manicore marmoset was discovered here, a primate new to science. Mixed groups of woolly monke...

Campos Amazonicos National Park: A Corridor Under Siege

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Campos Amazonicos is not simply a standalone park. It forms part of an ecological corridor stretching from the Xingu Indigenous Park in Mato Grosso and Para, through the Terra do Meio Mosaic and the Juruena National Park, to the Apui Mosaic in Amazonas. This chain of protected ar...