Escape Routes: Rewilding Argentina

Condé Nast Traveller Podcast

This episode of Condé Nast Traveler's Escape Routes features writer Alex Postman recounting his journey through the Iberá wetlands and Patag

Key takeaways

• The Iberá wetlands have transitioned from lifeless cattle watering holes to biodiverse ecosystems with 370 bird species.
• Rewilding Argentina and Rewilding Chile are responsible for managing approximately 15 million protected acres.

Main topics

• Rewilding Argentina
• Iberá Wetlands

Notable quotes

Argentina is where Africa was 30 years ago.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a powerful testament to how intentional rewildin

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:09) Welcome to Escape Roots with Condé Nast Traveler. My name is Divya Sani, Global Editorial Director of Condé Nast Traveler, and it is my pleasure to introduce you to our podcast series. Travel is all about storytelling, a story of a place, of its people, of a journey, and at Condé Nast Traveler, we've always celebrated the most transportative, evocative travel writing. we've come together to take you to some of our favorite places, if only in your imagination, by listening to our most loved travel stories read aloud by the writers who penned them. We hope these short escape routes allow you to daydream of far-flung adventures, discover the world's curious corners, or recast familiar destinations in a fresh light, and that you love these travel stories as much as I do. Speaker 2 (1:03) This podcast is sponsored Speaker 4 (1:04) by MasterCard, which is committed to restoring 100 million trees by 2025 with the Priceless Planet Coalition and its 18 restoration projects across the globe. MasterCard is also dedicated to helping its cardholders explore the world with complete confidence, backed by the MasterCard Hotel Stay and lowest hotel rate guarantees. Travel.MasterCard.com. Speaker 1 (1:27) Hello, my name is Alex Postman. Welcome to Conde Nast Traveler's Escape Routes. I will be reading my piece on Rewilding Argentina, which was featured in the October 2022 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. I hope you enjoy it. Speaker 1 (1:48) An hour before sunset, the Ibera wetlands wrestle to life as if cued by a conductor. Capybaras, the region's large anvil-headed rodents, snuffle through the grass. Raucous lapwings crisscross the sky, and three tawny, web-footed marsh deer wade along the edge of the swamp. Only two decades earlier, it had been a lifeless cattle watering hole. As I amble by on horseback, our guide, Mingo Gonzalez, names a few of Ibera's 370 bird species along the path. Tiger heron, bare-faced ibis, strange-tailed tyrant. He admits he wasn't all that well-versed in wildlife as a gaucho who grew up in the nearby village of Colonia Carlos Pellegrini. Back then, nature wasn't so much revered as ignored or feared. Previous generations used to hunt jaguars to protect their cattle, selling the skins to fur traders. Although the big cats symbolize strength among the indigenous Guarani of Corrientes province, the last one was seen here in the 1950s. We dismount in a savanna where we find that the staff at our lodge, the Rincon del Secoiro, have set a table with bottles of Argentine Malbec and a platter of local meats and cheeses. With the cracked yolk of the sun trickling behind a skeletal acacia tree, you could swear you were on safari in Africa. It is a resemblance that may be more than a wide-field illusion, given the Pangea theory, that South America and Africa once formed a supercontinent that broke apart more than 200 million years ago. From the small plane we flew in from Posadas, we watched the landscape tip over from cattle ranches to a flat mosaic of floating grass islands. It looked strikingly like Botswana's Okavango Delta, though at 1.8 million acres, the Ibera wetlands are only about half that size. As it happens, Africa has inspired the most wide-reaching conservation effort ever in Argentina, a country notorious for the ravages of its beef industry. This has led to the restoration of massive swaths of land into flourishing, biodiverse ecosystems, sustained by income generated by tourism. This model New wildernesses secured with the creation of local jobs and ecotourism is being adapted in South America on a huge scale by the foundation's Rewilding Argentina and Rewilding Chile, heirs to the legacy of Tompkins conservation. Starting in the 1990s, American husband and wife activists Doug and Chris Tompkins a co-founder of the North Face and Patagonia's former CEO, respectively, started buying up strategic tracts of land to protect across the two countries. The NGOs spun off in 2015 after Doug was killed in a kayaking accident. Between them, the two organizations are responsible for 15 million protected acres, which are now being donated in stages to the public as national parks. Meanwhile, the foundations are putting lodges and visitor centers in place. training rangers and guides, and stabilizing keystone species. Here in Argentina, where nature tourism is still in its infancy, Rewilding's long-term vision is to create a circuit of parks from the Amazon-like El Impenetrable and Ibera wetlands in the far north, where I've started my trip, to high plateau Parque Patagonia, more than 1,000 miles south, where I'll head in a few days' time. Argentina is where Africa was 30 years ago, says Les Carlyle, the former head of conservation for the African ecotourism company and