Qualla: Peruvian Amazonia

Peruvian Amazonia: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John McConnell (flag designer)NASA (Earth photograph)SiBr4 (flag image), Public domain. More than 60 percent of Peru is covered by Amazon rainforest. Five percent of Peruvians live there. That single ratio tells you most of what matters about Peruvian Amazonia - a region so vast it makes the Andean sierra and coastal desert look like narrow strips, a region so depopulated that an area bigger than Spain is watched, on a good day, by fewer than a hundred environmental prosecutors. Peru has the second-largest share of the Amazon after Brazil. It has the most biologically diverse ecosystem on Earth within its borders. And it has, for the last several decades, watched that ecosystem come apart under the pressure of illegal logging, illegal gold mining, and oil extraction that the state cannot - or will not - stop.

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Image: John McConnell (flag designer)NASA (Earth photograph)SiBr4 (flag image) | Public domain

Peruvian Amazonia: Two Jungles, One Basin

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Corey Spruit, CC BY 2.0. The Peruvian Amazon divides into two ecoregions that behave very differently. The lowland jungle - Selva Baja, sometimes called the Omagua region - sits between 80 and 1,000 meters above sea level and averages 28 degrees Celsius with 75 percent humidity and 260 centimeters of rai...

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Image: Corey Spruit | CC BY 2.0

Peruvian Amazonia: The Cities in the Green

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0. Iquitos is the largest city you cannot reach by road. Half a million people at 104 meters above sea level on the Amazon River, served only by boat and plane, a boom town from the rubber era that still runs on mototaxis and river commerce and a bilingual mix of Spanish, Quechua, a...

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Image: Frank Vincentz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Peruvian Amazonia: The Rebellion That Held for 150 Years

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin St-Amant (S23678), CC BY-SA 3.0. In the 1730s Franciscan missionaries established stations in the Gran Pajonal - the high-altitude plateau held by the Asháninka. In the 1740s the Asháninka destroyed them. Their leader, Juan Santos Atahualpa, took the name of the last Inca and claimed the mantle of resistance. Sp...

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Image: Martin St-Amant (S23678) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Peruvian Amazonia: The Laundering Machine

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin St-Amant (S23678), CC BY-SA 3.0. In 2012 the World Bank estimated that 80 percent of Peru's timber exports were illegally harvested. The Environmental Investigation Agency produced a report titled The Laundering Machine describing how it works: concessionaires submit lists of trees that do not exist, complicit o...

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Image: Martin St-Amant (S23678) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Peruvian Amazonia: Gold, Oil, and the View from Space

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin St-Amant (S23678), CC BY-SA 3.0. Illegal gold mining has devoured a piece of Madre de Dios big enough to see from orbit. Gold prices rose 360 percent over the decade to 2021, and an estimated 30,000 miners without permits now operate along the Interoceanic Highway that connects Peru to Brazil. They use mercury t...

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Image: Martin St-Amant (S23678) | CC BY-SA 3.0