Largest national park in eastern Paraguay, protecting a vast mosaic of cerrado, forest, and wetland habitats near the Brazilian border.
Paso Bravo National Park
Paso Bravo National Park is a large protected area in northern Paraguay, situated in the San Carlos district of Concepción department close to the border with Brazil. With an area of roughly 1,030 square kilometers, it is the largest national park in the eastern side of the country, a region dominated by rolling cerrado savanna, transitional forest patches, and seasonal wetlands rather than the dry Chaco plains further west.
The park is ecologically significant because it harbors an estimated 48 percent of Paraguay's recorded wild species. Its forests and waterways shelter large cats such as jaguar and puma, the maned wolf, giant anteaters, giant otters, caimans, anacondas, and boa constrictors, together with a rich avifauna highlighted by the greater rhea and numerous parrot species. This combination of high biodiversity, frontier location, and substantial size gives Paso Bravo a notable place within Paraguay's protected-area system.
The park also has a distinctive cultural and botanical dimension. Paso Bravo is recognized as part of the ancestral distribution range of cultivated pineapple, cassava, and wild tomato, plants whose pre-Columbian dispersal from this region reached as far as Mesoamerica. Today it functions as a key conservation area within the Concepción corridor, helping maintain ecological connectivity between Paraguayan habitats and the broader South American interior forest network.
