Cristalino Private Reserve

The towers are the point. Two of them, fifty metres of galvanised steel and 250 steps, standing clear of a canopy that runs off in every direction, and if you are up there before five you watch the rios voadores come off the forest, whole air masses heavy with water vapour moving away over the trees. The reserves under them hold 595 bird species, roughly a third of every bird species in Brazil.

The Reservas Naturais do Cristalino run to more than seven thousand hectares along the Cristalino river in northern Mato Grosso. Two of them, Gavião-real at 2,420 hectares and Mirante da Serra at 1,616.7, are formally designated private natural heritage reserves; a third, Castanheira at 2,502.7, is still waiting for its creation process to close. They sit inside an ecological corridor with Cristalino State Park, the Juruena National Park, the Nascentes da Serra do Cachimbo biological reserve, indigenous territories and an air force base, which together work as a barrier against deforestation spreading through southern Amazonia. IUCN's account of the place is that the tourism pays for the conservation, funding the reserve's upkeep, its research and its environmental education work, and that the reserve has built a network among neighbouring landowners for real-time information and joint firefighting when the dry season burns. Nothing here is promised: 1,400 plant species, 1,500 butterflies, seven primates and fifty non-flying mammals are what has been catalogued, and what you see is what the forest decides to show you.