Qualla: Great Pontal Reserve

Great Pontal Reserve: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA and Miguelrangeljr, Public domain. On November 25, 1942, Governor Fernando Costa signed decree 13.075 and created an ecological reserve of 246,840 hectares in the westernmost pocket of Sao Paulo state, bounded by two great rivers and protected by statute. Fifty-five years later, in 1997, the reserve was what people called a legal fiction. Most of the trees were gone. The land had been squatted, farmed, and flooded. The decree still existed. The forest did not. Its story is the quiet, painful arc of how a reserve can disappear without ever technically being abolished, and how the process of losing a forest is often just the process of not defending it.

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Image: NASA and Miguelrangeljr | Public domain

Great Pontal Reserve: A Reserve Born in a Hurry

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Costa had reason to hurry. The Sorocabana Railway had reached the Parana River in 1917, and what followed was the standard frontier pattern: loggers first, then coffee farmers, then cotton and peanuts, then cattle on whatever remained. By 1941, the Morro do Diabo Forest Reserve w...

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Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Great Pontal Reserve: How a Forest Gets Erased on Paper First

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA and Miguelrangeljr, Public domain. The line started dissolving almost immediately. Costa's successor Adhemar de Barros had no interest in the reserves. Local mayors wanted the land for their constituents. In 1944, Adhemar de Barros signed a decree that cut the Great Pontal Reserve by more than half, from 246,840 t...

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Image: NASA and Miguelrangeljr | Public domain

Great Pontal Reserve: The Dam That Swallowed the Rest

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA and Miguelrangeljr, Public domain. In the 1980s, the Companhia Energetica de Sao Paulo began construction on the Engenheiro Sergio Motta Hydroelectric Power Plant, a massive project that would dam the Parana and create a reservoir large enough to be visible from orbit. Law 10.018 of July 2, 1998 formally removed 1...

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Image: NASA and Miguelrangeljr | Public domain

Great Pontal Reserve: What Conservation Looks Like After a Loss

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA and Miguelrangeljr, Public domain. By 1997, the state was negotiating a settlement with the squatters. Give some land back, get clear title to the rest. Three NGOs pushed the government to make sure the land returned to public hands was the forested portion, not the worst-eroded pastureland. The Mico Leao Preto Ec...

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Image: NASA and Miguelrangeljr | Public domain

Great Pontal Reserve: A Poor Land Where a Rich Forest Once Stood

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NASA and Miguelrangeljr, Public domain. The Pontal do Paranapanema today is the poorest region in the state of Sao Paulo. The cattle pastures and sugarcane fields that replaced the forest do not pay well, because the soil is low in fertility and the distance to markets is long. What was sacrificed for farmland turned o...

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Image: NASA and Miguelrangeljr | Public domain