- Where
- Northern Pantanal, Poconé,
Mato Grosso, Brazil - Coordinates
- 16.66° S
56.78° W (SEMA-MT camera point) - Road park
- MT-060, km 17 to km 142
(state decree 1.028 of 1996) - Birds
- 700 species in the national park
(Ramsar record) - Dry season
- May to September
(Ramsar information sheet) - Best visited
- The dry season,
May to September - Advisory
- Brazil Level 2
(land borders: do not travel)
A raised dirt road running dead straight across flat wet country, and a rickety wooden bridge every few minutes, each one announcing us. Under every bridge the shrinking pools were packed: crocodile-ish things side by side, storks taller than me in red collars, fish jumping from sheer lack of room. Then a pair of enormous blue parrots in a palm, complaining loudly about the heat. I agreed with every word.
The short answer
The Pantanal is a seasonally flooded plain in the upper basin of the Paraguay River, shared by Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, with more than 70 per cent of it in the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, according to Brazil’s Ramsar information sheet for Pantanal Matogrossense National Park. The sheet puts the floodplain at 138,000 square kilometres of the 361,000 in the Brazilian part of the basin, and gives the dry season as May to September and the rains as October to April. The Transpantaneira, state road MT-060, crosses its northern part in the municipality of Poconé; the stretch from an inspection post at kilometre 17 to Porto Jofre at kilometre 142 is the Estrada Parque Transpantaneira, a state conservation unit for sustainable use created by Decree 1.028 of 1996, according to Mato Grosso’s environment secretariat (SEMA-MT). The Ramsar record for the national park, a protected area of 135,000 hectares far to the west near the Bolivian border, gives 700 bird species and calls the region one of the most important wetlands in South America for waterbirds.
Why it's worth knowing
A road that the wildlife uses too. SEMA-MT treats the road park as a sensitive area: the road divides the northern Pantanal, and animals that cross it risk being run over and caught by predators. During the fires that swept the Pantanal in 2020, the secretariat set up an emergency care post for wild animals on the road, and its report on that work recommended monitoring the wildlife. Since March 2022 the secretariat has kept camera traps at 15 points over about 67 km of the road, with the help of the farms and lodges along it. In its first year they made 17,711 records of 95 species; in its second, 14,391 images of 79. Over the two years jaguars were recorded 306 times at 13 of the 15 points, and tapirs and jaguarundis at every point. The report warns that a record is not an animal: the same individual is photographed again and again, so the totals show how often a species passes, not how many there are. Among birds, the bare-faced curassow was the most recorded species in both years, with more than 1,100 records in each.
A parrot that waits for a tree. The hyacinth macaw, the largest of the parrots, up to a metre from beak to tail and 1.3 kg, is a bird of the Pantanal. FAPESP’s magazine Pesquisa FAPESP, reporting in November 2022 on a 30-year study by the biologist Neiva Guedes and colleagues, says there were only about 2,500 in the 1980s, when the species was considered threatened with extinction, and that the Pantanal population is now estimated at about 6,000; the IUCN lists it as vulnerable. The pair nests in a tree hollow, and in 95 per cent of cases, the article says, that hollow is in a manduvi tree, Sterculia apetala; only trees more than 60 years old have holes big enough. A female lays two eggs on average in a breeding season that runs from July to February, and usually only one chick survives. The study followed 473 natural nests and 415 artificial ones, built by the researchers, between 1991 and 2021, most of them in Mato Grosso do Sul, in the southern Pantanal; the magazine notes the fear that recent droughts and fires could push the species back towards endangered.
The field notes
The water’s calendar
The Ramsar information sheet describes a tropical climate with a summer wet season and a dry winter: dry from May to September, wet from October to April, and wettest from December to February. Between September and December the highest temperatures exceed 40°C, with an average around 32°C, it says. The rivers that make the Pantanal come down from the surrounding highlands and merge on the plain into what the Ramsar record calls an enormous inland delta; the Cuiabá River, the main tributary of the Paraguay, drains almost 100,000 square kilometres. The Pantanal also sits where three of South America’s great biomes meet, the Amazon, the Cerrado and the Chaco, the record says.
Nests over the water
The national park’s information sheet gives a picture of the region’s birds in the breeding season: jabirus, wood storks, cocoi herons and great egrets choose broad trees to build their nests and feed in the channels, near capped herons and roseate spoonbills, while caimans wait below the nests for an inexperienced young bird to fall. Blue-and-yellow, red-and-green and yellow-collared macaws cross the sky, and birds of prey such as the crested caracara and the snail kite hunt alone. The jabiru, the tall black-necked stork that Brazilians call tuiuiú, appears on SEMA-MT’s camera traps along the Transpantaneira too.
What the Ramsar record worries about
The record for Pantanal Matogrossense National Park, designated a Wetland of International Importance on 24 May 1993 and also listed as a World Heritage Site and a Biosphere Reserve, names the region’s threatened mammals, among them the marsh deer, the giant anteater, the giant armadillo and the giant otter. It lists the threats as uncontrolled tourism, recreational fishing, hunting and the smuggling of endangered species, and deforestation. The information sheet adds an invader: the golden mussel, Limnoperna fortunei, first recorded in the Plata basin in 1991 and in the Pantanal in 1998.
Still water and gallery forest in the Pantanal, Brazil.
Photograph: Nathalia Segato via Unsplash · Unsplash licence · cropped
September 2015A hyacinth macaw in flight.
Photograph: Charles J. Sharp · CC BY-SA 4.0 · cropped
September 2015A wood stork beside a yacare caiman.
Photograph: Charles J. Sharp · CC BY-SA 4.0
- Drive it slowly, with the windows down. Most of the road’s animals are in the ditch beside you, not at the end of it.
- Count the bridges. (Lost count at the bridge with a stork on it. Began again. Lost count at the next stork. Item suspended until the storks agree to stop.)
- Sit beside one drying pool for an hour and let the herons decide that you are furniture.
- The land either side of the road is somebody’s farm. Close the gates you open, and give the cattle and the people herding them the road.
- Look up as well as down. The loudest residents live at the tops of the trees, and they have opinions.
A nest hollow in a manduvi tree. Hyacinth macaws in the Pantanal nest in tree hollows, and in 95 per cent of the nests followed in a 30-year study led by the biologist Neiva Guedes, the hollow was in a manduvi, Sterculia apetala, a large tree with a reddish-brown trunk whose seeds the macaws also eat; only trees more than 60 years old have holes big enough, Pesquisa FAPESP reported in November 2022. The macaws compete with one another and with other birds for them.
Tally, in the marginA dark hole in an old tree, with nothing much to look at, and I nearly walked past it on my way to the parrots. It was the end of the afternoon before I saw that the tree had been doing most of the work, slowly, and a very long time before anyone came to watch.
Getting there
How to get there. The road park begins at the state inspection post at kilometre 17 of MT-060, in the municipality of Poconé, and ends at Porto Jofre at kilometre 142, SEMA-MT says. Mato Grosso’s infrastructure secretariat (Sinfra-MT) gave the road’s length as 137 km from Poconé to Porto Jofre in July 2024, and said that in 2019 it had 120 bridges, 88 of them wooden; the secretariat is replacing the wooden bridges with concrete ones, because, it says, the wooden ones need repairing almost every year, and in July 2024 was building the largest, 120 metres long, over the Figueira River. Its maintenance work on the road includes gravelling the surface and compacting the embankments, it said in October 2022. We did not read an official page on flights to Cuiabá, the state capital, or on the drive from there to Poconé, so we give neither. The farms and lodges that host the state’s cameras are along the road itself.
When to go. The Ramsar information sheet gives May to September as the dry season and October to April as the rains, wettest from December to February. Hyacinth macaws breed from July to February, by FAPESP’s account.
What to arrange ahead. SEMA-MT’s reports describe no entry fee or permit for the road park, and we found no official visitor page for it; lodging along the road is booked with the lodges or through operators.
Access. The road is a gravelled state road on embankments, by Sinfra-MT’s account of its maintenance work, and the lodges are spread along it. We read no official page on road conditions in the rains.
Safety. The US State Department has Brazil at Level 2, exercise increased caution, due to crime and kidnapping (advisory dated 31 August 2026). It says not to travel to Brazil’s international land borders, to informal housing developments, or to Brasília’s satellite cities, and requires its own employees to get special authorization for travel within 160 km of the land borders, except to Foz do Iguaçu and the Pantanal. SEMA-MT’s camera points along the road park lie between 16.4° and 16.9° S and 56.7° and 56.9° W, inland of the Bolivian border by our reading of the map; the Ramsar national park lies far to the west, near the border. Fire is the Pantanal’s own hazard in the dry season: SEMA-MT set up its emergency wildlife post on the road during the fires of 2020. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes travel health guidance for Brazil; talk to your doctor before a trip like this.
Mark this place
Common questions
What is the Transpantaneira?
The Transpantaneira is Mato Grosso state road MT-060, which crosses the northern Pantanal in the municipality of Poconé, Brazil. Its stretch from kilometre 17 to Porto Jofre at kilometre 142 is the Estrada Parque Transpantaneira, a state sustainable-use conservation unit created by Decree 1.028 of 1996, according to Mato Grosso’s environment secretariat.
When is the dry season in the Pantanal?
Brazil’s Ramsar information sheet for Pantanal Matogrossense National Park gives the dry season as May to September and the rainy season as October to April, wettest from December to February. Between September and December, it says, the highest temperatures exceed 40°C.
How many bird species live in the Pantanal?
The Ramsar record for Pantanal Matogrossense National Park, a 135,000-hectare protected area in the western Pantanal of Mato Grosso, Brazil, gives 700 bird species, with 90 mammal, 160 reptile, 260 fish and 45 amphibian species, and calls it one of the most important wetlands in South America for waterbirds.
Can you see jaguars along the Transpantaneira?
Mato Grosso’s environment secretariat recorded jaguars 306 times at 13 of its 15 camera-trap points along the Transpantaneira between 2022 and 2024. The secretariat notes that records are not a count of animals, because the same jaguar is photographed many times.
Where do hyacinth macaws nest in the Pantanal?
In 95 per cent of cases, hyacinth macaws in the Pantanal nest in hollows of the manduvi tree, Sterculia apetala, and only trees more than 60 years old have holes big enough, according to Pesquisa FAPESP’s report on Neiva Guedes’s 30-year study. The breeding season runs from July to February.
How many hyacinth macaws are there in the Pantanal?
Pesquisa FAPESP reported in November 2022 that the hyacinth macaw population of the Pantanal is estimated at about 6,000, up from about 2,500 in the 1980s, and that the IUCN lists the species as vulnerable. The recovery owes much to the Instituto Arara Azul, founded by the biologist Neiva Guedes.
What level does the US State Department give Brazil?
The US State Department has Brazil at Level 2, exercise increased caution, due to crime and kidnapping (advisory dated 31 August 2026). It says not to travel to Brazil’s international land borders, and exempts the Pantanal from its 160 km border-area travel rule for US government employees.
Why does Mato Grosso monitor wildlife on the Transpantaneira?
Mato Grosso’s environment secretariat set up an emergency wildlife care post on the Transpantaneira during the 2020 Pantanal fires, and began camera-trap monitoring in March 2022, at 15 points over about 67 km, to learn which species use the road park and where they cross it.