Qualla: Juruena National Park

Juruena National Park: Introduction

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tiago Bandeira Duarte, CC BY-SA 4.0. The rivers give the first warning that navigation is unwelcome. Green in the dry season and muddy during the rains, the waterways of Juruena National Park are choked with rocky outcrops, rapids of every size, and waterfalls that have been reshaping stone since long before humans reached the Amazon. At nearly two million hectares, Juruena is Brazil's third-largest national park, and its terrain seems designed to resist easy access -- forty-nine percent flat plains, yes, but the rest undulates upward through increasingly rugged country, with altitudes ranging from 39 meters to peaks that rise well above. This is not a park that invites casual visitors. It is a fortress of forest, river, and stone, holding one of the most biologically significant corridors on the continent.

Read more: Juruena National Park on Qualla

Image: Tiago Bandeira Duarte | CC BY-SA 4.0

Juruena National Park: Thirty-Nine Basins Under One Canopy

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tiago Bandeira Duarte, CC BY-SA 4.0. Juruena contains thirty-nine river sub-basins, each feeding into the Juruena River that gives the park its name. The largest belongs to the Sao Tome River, which occupies twenty-three percent of the park's area and has every one of its sources contained within the boundaries. The...

Read more: Juruena National Park on Qualla

Image: Tiago Bandeira Duarte | CC BY-SA 4.0

Juruena National Park: The Ecological Corridor

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathan Rabelo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Juruena was not created in isolation. Declared by decree on June 5, 2006, under the Amazon Region Protected Areas Programme launched in 2002, it forms one link in an ecological corridor that stretches across the heart of Brazil. The chain runs from the Xingu Indigenous Park in Ma...

Read more: Juruena National Park on Qualla

Image: Jonathan Rabelo | CC BY-SA 3.0

Juruena National Park: Wings, Calls, and Endemic Lives

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tiago Bandeira Duarte, CC BY-SA 4.0. Researchers have identified 412 bird species within the park, forty of which are endemic to the southern Amazon and at least twenty-six restricted to the corridor between the Madeira and Tapajos rivers. The bald parrot, with its vivid orange crown, is found almost nowhere else. T...

Read more: Juruena National Park on Qualla

Image: Tiago Bandeira Duarte | CC BY-SA 4.0

Juruena National Park: The Dams That Didn't Come

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Renato Soares Moreira, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2014, the stakes sharpened. The federal government proposed building two hydroelectric dams -- Sao Simao Alto and Salto Augusto Baixo -- within the park, with a combined capacity of 4,940 megawatts. The reservoirs would have drowned more than 40,000 hectares, flooding portions...

Read more: Juruena National Park on Qualla

Image: Renato Soares Moreira | CC BY-SA 3.0