Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco

Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco National Park and Integrated Management Natural Area was established in 1995 in south-eastern Bolivia, in the department of Santa Cruz and next to the Paraguayan border, and at some 34,400 km² it is the country's largest national park and one of the largest protected areas in the Americas.

Its creation has a pioneering feature: it was driven by the Capitanía del Alto y Bajo Izozog, an organisation of the Izoceño Guaraní people, and is regarded as the first national park in Latin America created at the initiative of an indigenous people and co-managed by them. The name means, in Guaraní, the owners of the forest.

It protects the largest continuous expanse of dry Chaco under protection: a dense, hard-to-penetrate thorn forest, with quebracho, palo santo and cacti, on sandy soils and with an extreme dry season. That isolation has preserved important populations of jaguar, giant armadillo and the Chacoan peccary or tagua, a species described for science in 1975 from living specimens, when it was known only from fossils and had been thought extinct for thousands of years. The park faces pressure from the advance of the agricultural frontier and from hydrocarbon exploration.