Earth Train

Mamoní Valley Preserve

The Significance

The Preserve's conservation and restoration efforts are strengthening one of the most important areas for the protection of biodiversity in the world.

- Lider Sucre, Executive Director of the Museum of Biodiversity, in an interview with CNN reporter Alan Duke.

(Download our Mamoní Valley PDF presentation for a full-color tour of the preserve.)

The Mamoni Valley Preserve contains 10,000 acres of pasture lands, and primary and secondary rainforest. The Preserve is home to jaguar, Panama's national bird the harpy eagle, tapirs, tucans, four Panamanian settler communities, and Earth Train's campus for Education and Research, Centro Mamoní.

The Mamoni Valley Preserve was created by a partnership between Earth Train and Rainforest Capital. Earth Train manages the land inside the Preserve.

The Story

By the fall of 2004, we realized that the watershed of the upper Mamoní was in the grips of an acute crisis. Driven primarily by absentee ranchers, the cutting and burning of primary forest and the degradation of land by overgrazing was now threatening to change the area's moist microclimate and to increase the destructiveness of river floods. We decided to put most of Earth Train's international programs on hold in order to concentrate on the protection and restoration of the upper Rio Mamoní.

The watershed of the upper Rio Mamoní - approximately 12 miles long and covering a total of 36 square miles - is located only 25 miles to the east of Panama City on the Southwest border of Kuna Yala, the semi-autonomous region of the indigenous Kuna. The integrity of the upper Mamoní watershed, along with its six major tributaries, is critical to the water security of Panamá. The valley is a gateway to both the Chagres National Forest, the protected watershed of the inter-oceanic canal, and to the pristine primary forests and rivers of Kuna Yala as they flow to the Caribbean.

The Kuna revere this land as the divine Madre Tierra; its fate is one with their own. It is equally important as a buffer region to the Darien, a huge area of wilderness in eastern Panama whose forests play a critical role in mediating the climate of the country by blocking the prevailing winds. Even more directly, for the small farmers who started settling the area sixty years ago, the Mamoní watershed holds the promise of a stable economic future and increased opportunities for later generations.