The Pantanal,
stop by stop.

Opened in 1973 and never finished, the MT-060 road runs due south from Poconé for 147 kilometres of red laterite and stops dead at Porto Jofre. It crosses around 122 wooden bridges, many of them with missing planks you can spot from afar. The raised embankment of the track serves as a refuge for wildlife when the water rises: yacare caimans lined up in the ditches, capybaras, jabirus, herons and sometimes a tapir at dusk. You drive at 30 km/h, windows down, stopping at every bridge. Allow three to four hours without stops, twice that if you really look for wildlife.

The yacare caiman is the animal you see most in the Pantanal: a 2013 estimate put the number at around ten million on the floodplain alone, a population that has recovered from the hunting for leather in the 1980s. Males reach two to three metres. The capybara, the largest rodent in the world, lives in family groups that graze at the water's edge. In the dry season, from May to October, the ponds shrink and both species gather there by the dozen, sometimes in the same frame. The ditches of the Transpantaneira and the riverbanks are the best viewing spots.

The cobalt-blue hyacinth macaw measures about a metre from head to tail, making it the largest flying parrot. In the Pantanal it feeds almost exclusively on the nuts of two palms, the acuri and the bocaiuva, and 90% of its nests are in cavities of the manduvi tree. Its wild population, which fell to a few thousand birds in the 1980s, now exceeds six thousand individuals in the Pantanal according to the Instituto Arara Azul, which has monitored its nests for more than thirty years. Around it you will see toco toucans, jabirus, large wading birds that have become the emblem of the region, and giant otters on the rivers.

Founded in 1778 on a limestone cliff overlooking the Rio Paraguai, Corumbá is the gateway to the southern Pantanal and the main river port of inland Brazil. Below the old town, the Porto Geral lines up 19th-century warehouses and trading houses from the days when steamboats came upriver from the Río de la Plata; bars and craft shops occupy them today. At sunset the quay looks out over the meanders of the river and over Bolivia, some fifteen kilometres away. Fishing boats leave from here in the early morning.

On the Mato Grosso do Sul side, this 120-kilometre dirt track links the Buraco das Piranhas junction, on the BR-262, to the town of Corumbá. It crosses more than 70 wooden bridges and two rivers: the Rio Miranda at Passo do Lontra and the Rio Paraguai at Porto da Manga, crossed by ferry. It is one of the best routes in the country for spotting caimans, capybaras, jabirus and marsh deer from the car, especially at dawn. Fazendas turned into pousadas line the track and hire out horses and boats by the day.