Nature pictures from Bolivia
These images are from the tropical lowlands of eastern Bolivia, including the Chaco forest and San Miguelito ranch. The photos were taken in 2019 by Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler.
The images are organized into galleries, the most popular of which are presented below.
The bottom of this page includes recent conservation news from Bolivia.
Themes
Places
Wildlife
Loma Santa marks first Indigenous protected area in the Bolivian Amazon (03 Dec 2025 11:42:00 +0000)
- Establishing the first Indigenous protected area in the Bolivian Amazon took years and involved local communities, NGOs and the government.
- This natural reserve is home to five Indigenous peoples of the Bolivian Amazon, who act as the guardians of Loma Santa.
- Imperiled by illegal logging, communities hope new tools will make combating the exploitation of their natural resources more effective.
- The protected area emerged from the first Indigenous territorial autonomy in the Bolivian Amazon, where the communities have their own system of self-governance.
Weather disasters are surging in the Amazon. Reporting isn’t. (24 Nov 2025 10:23:45 +0000)
The Amazon’s climate hazards are growing faster than governments can track.
The land deal threatening a vital piece of Bolivia’s Chiquitano dry forest (20 Nov 2025 15:08:03 +0000)
- A 30,019-hectare (74,178-acre) forest in Santa Cruz, Bolivia is on the verge of being sold to Bom Futuro, a Brazilian agriculture company with plans to clear the land, documents reviewed by Mongabay suggest.
- The forest is being sold by a local affiliate of Dutch wood flooring producer INPA, which has helped sustainably manage the area since the mid-2000s.
- Conservationists say the plot is an important part of Bolivia’s Chiquitano dry forest, which acts as a transition between the Amazon Rainforest and the Gran Chaco and Cerrado savannas.
Top ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin’s COP30 reflections on Amazon conservation (analysis) (17 Nov 2025 21:45:26 +0000)
- The global battle to mitigate climate change cannot be won in the Amazon, but it can certainly be lost there, writes top ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin in a new analysis for Mongabay. Though he’s well-known for investigating traditional uses of plants in the region, he’s also a keen observer of and advocate for Indigenous communities and conservation there.
- Compared to the 1970s, he writes, the Amazon enjoys far greater formal protection, understanding and attention, while advances in technology and ethnobotany have revealed new insights into tropical biodiversity, and Indigenous communities — long the guardians and stewards of this ecosystem — are increasingly recognized as central partners in conservation, and their shamans employ hallucinogens like biological scalpels to diagnose, treat and sometimes cure ailments, a technology that is increasingly and ever more widely appreciated.
- “The challenge now is to ensure that the forces of protection outpace the forces of destruction, which, of course, is one of the ultimate goals of the COP30 meeting in Belém,” he writes.
- This article is an analysis. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.
How a ‘green gold rush’ in the Amazon led to dubious carbon deals on Indigenous lands (11 Nov 2025 19:06:47 +0000)
- A Mongabay investigation has found that companies without the financial or technical expertise signed deals with Indigenous communities in Brazil and Bolivia, covering millions of hectares of forest, for carbon and biodiversity credits.
- Many of the communities involved say they were rushed into signing, never had the chance to give consent, and didn’t understand what they were signing up to or even who with.
- Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency has warned of legal insecurity and lack of standards in carbon credit initiatives, and an inquiry is underway — even as the businessmen involved target more than 1.7 million hectares in the tri-border area between Brazil, Bolivia and Peru.
- Two and a half years since the deals were made, Brazil’s Public Ministry has called for them to be annulled, following Mongabay’s repeated requests to the ministry for updates.
Across the Amazon, impunity among politicians remains chronic (07 Nov 2025 09:56:43 +0000)
- Special protocols for the prosecution of elected officials are used to protect them from trivial or politically motivated proceedings, but they can help them avoid accountability for illegal actions.
- Often, their trials are delayed until the charges are dismissed due to technicalities, to the statute of limitations, or because they have been acquitted by politically influenced judges.
- This type of constitutional impunity has been common in Brazil, Bolivia, and Venezuela, from the Lava Jato case to Hugo Chavez’s legal warfare on his political opponents.
Despite new land title, Bolivia’s Indigenous Tacana II still face invaders (03 Nov 2025 16:03:57 +0000)
- After a process lasting more than two decades, the Bolivian government has granted the Indigenous Tacana II people a formal title to their ancestral territory, encompassing more than 272,000 hectares of land.
- While this recognition grants them full ownership and legal security, leaders and researchers say it is not enough to protect them from the country’s political insecurity, the lack of enforcement of environmental regulations and invasions by illegal actors.
- The Tacana people have reported land encroachments and the illegal opening of roads, which impact the transit zone for uncontacted Indigenous peoples.
- ● Experts on Indigenous Peoples in Isolation and Initial Contact (PIACI) told Mongabay that the title may provide a territorial barrier for the isolated people, but specific territorial protection measures are still required to guarantee their full protection.
The rise of anti-corruption prosecutors in the Amazon region (24 Oct 2025 11:00:05 +0000)
- One of the most critical links in enforcing environmental laws is the public prosecutor’s office. Across the region, its efficiency varies, with the majority of cases still under investigation or dismissed.
- Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru have focused on strengthening anti-corruption prosecutors’ offices. One of the most high-profile cases was Lava Jato, which led to the arrest of officials and businesspeople in different parts of South America.
- However, in countries such as Bolivia and Venezuela, prosecutors have used the judicial system to attack corruption in the political opposition.
In the heart of Bolivia, the mountain that financed an empire risks collapsing (22 Oct 2025 09:13:49 +0000)
- After nearly 500 years of mining, Cerro Rico, the Bolivian mountain whose silver financed the Spanish Empire, is experiencing increasingly frequent and severe cave-ins.
- With silver prices at decade highs, mining activity on Cerro Rico has surged in recent years.
- The collapses endanger the safety and livelihoods of communities living and working on the mountain, the majority of them Indigenous Quechua.
- Lacking both funding and alternative sites to relocate miners, efforts to preserve the mountain have been delayed and ineffective.
MPs across Latin America unite to stop fossil fuels in the Amazon (09 Oct 2025 13:05:13 +0000)
- On Oct. 7, a network of more than 900 lawmakers presented the results of a parliamentary investigation into the phaseout of fossil fuels in the Amazon at the Brazilian National Congress in Brasília.
- The report by Parliamentarians for a Fossil-Free Future links fossil fuel extraction in the Amazon to deforestation, ecosystem fragmentation, pollution from spills and toxic waste, community displacement, health problems and violence from armed groups.
- MPs from five Amazonian countries — Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia — have presented law proposals in their national parliaments to halt the expansion of fossil fuel extraction in the Amazon region of their countries. But the level of ambition varies across nations, with countries still relying heavily on extractive industries.
This collection of nature photos from Bolivia is part of Mongabay's library of 150,000-plus images. Other images may be available beyond those displayed on this page.
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