Manu

Declared in 1973, extended over the decades and raised to a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1977 and a World Heritage Site in 1987, Manu is unique among Latin American national parks in protecting an unbroken ecological transition from 300 metres in the lowland Amazon up to more than 4,000 metres in the high Andean puna, with no administrative break in between. That altitudinal sweep makes it one of the most biodiverse places documented anywhere, with over a thousand bird species recorded — close to 10% of all the birds in the world in a single park. Its core zone remains closed to general tourism and reserved exclusively for scientific research and for the indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation who still live in its remotest headwaters.