Paracas

Declared in 1975, it protects a stretch of coastal desert and southern Peruvian Pacific of exceptional biological productivity, thanks to the cold Humboldt Current, which brings nutrients up from the deep and supports one of the greatest biomasses of seabirds on the planet. For centuries the nearby islands were worked intensively for their guano — bird droppings accumulated over millennia and used as fertiliser — a resource so valuable in the 19th century that it funded much of the Peruvian state budget in what became known as the guano era, and even set off an international armed conflict, the Chincha Islands War, between Peru and Spain.