Iberá News

National Parks and Rewilding Argentina renew their Iberá partnership for ten years

Argentina's National Parks Administration and the Rewilding Argentina Foundation signed a new framework cooperation agreement for Iberá National Park and National Reserve, which will run for the next ten years. It renews and updates their joint work on four fronts: restoring the habitat and bringing back wildlife, public use and nature tourism at the entry portals, research, and work with neighbouring communities. In particular, it confirms and expands the conservation work on the jaguar and the giant otter.

The foundation was key to creating Iberá National Park in 2018: it bought land and donated it to the national state. The jaguar, extinct in Corrientes since 1953, now numbers more than 50 in Iberá. The president of National Parks, Sergio Álvarez, called the partnership's record "more than positive".

A year after their release, the first giant otter family is digging its own dens

In June 2025 the Rewilding Argentina Foundation released the country's first family of giant otters into Laguna Paraná, on San Alonso island: Coco, Nima and two cubs born in Iberá. A year on, the group has moved into other parts of the park and built its own dens in the woodland. It no longer relies on the ones in the enclosure, although it stays nearby. By day the otters fish and bask in the sun, and the team cuts back the food it gives them as it records them fishing on their own.

The last confirmed giant otters in Argentina had been seen on the upper Iguazú river, in 1986 and 1988. The project began in 2019 with the enclosures on San Alonso, is the only reintroduction project for the species in the world and now has more than 30 animals, counting those in the enclosures and those living free. A second family, formed at the Buenos Aires Ecoparque, is waiting to be released in El Impenetrable National Park, in Chaco.

Two jaguars are roaming around Loreto, and one was filmed beside Route 118

On Sunday 11 October a driver filmed a jaguar running a few metres along the shoulder of National Route 118, near Portal San Antonio, before slipping into the scrub. The video spread on social media and the mayor of Loreto, Orlando Maidana, confirmed it is current. There had already been a sighting in the same area on 21 September. According to the mayor, two jaguars have been moving around the district for four or five months: Ará Sunú, close to the town, and Kuarahy Catalino, which wears a tracking collar and keeps to the countryside on the Portal San Antonio side. Both came from San Alonso island, in the heart of the park, some 50 km away.

There have been no incidents. Park rangers will put up signs and the town is telling people by radio, social media and flyers what to do if they come across one. This page does not say which spot they frequent: whoever knows where a jaguar is can go and bother it.

On the night of Tuesday 13 October, the San Miguel police and the Provincial Park rangers began a joint operation around Portal San Antonio: they stop drivers to tell them a jaguar is about and ask them to slow down, especially at night.

Iberá now has more than 50 wild jaguars, and a four-country network wants to link it with the Pantanal

Fundación Rewilding Argentina told the story while launching "Jaguar Rivers" (Los ríos del Yaguareté), a network with Nativa (Bolivia), Onçafari (Brazil) and Fundación Moisés Bertoni (Paraguay) to reconnect the rivers and wetlands of the Paraná basin that jaguars move through. The 50th jaguar the foundation has registered living wild is one of Porá's cubs: it was born in April and its sex is not known yet. Its mother, Porá, walked out into the wetlands on 7 January 2021 with her own mother, Mariuá, and her sister Karaí: they were the first jaguar family released in Iberá. Porá now holds a territory at Corrales Grandes, close to where she was born.

The network starts by linking the Pantanal with Iberá: four biological stations, four boats and work with communities along 1,200 km of rivers. Iberá's more than 50 jaguars weigh in the national total: Argentina has 250 to 300 left, according to the latest available estimate, from 2022.

Nineteen years of rewilding: the species that came back to the wetlands, one by one

Iberá's wildlife restoration programme turned 19 and the national press took stock. It began in 2007 with a pair of giant anteaters released at Rincón del Socorro, and went on with the pampas deer (2009), the collared peccary and the red-and-green macaw (2015), the bare-faced curassow (2019), the giant otter and the jaguar, whose first family walked out into the wetlands in January 2021. By 2021 more than 200 giant anteaters were estimated to be living free.

The press counts seven species; Fundación Rewilding Argentina adds an eighth, the ocelot, on its Iberá Project page. The point of the programme is not just that they are back, but that they play their part in the ecosystem again.

A jaguar was seen twice near Concepción in the same week

Both sightings happened outside the park, in the municipality of Concepción del Yaguareté Corá. The first was near the Batel bridge and was reported by a group of schoolteachers. The second was on Thursday 21 August at the Pairirí settlement, and was caught on video.

There is no way to tell whether it was the same animal in both cases.

A jaguar had to climb a tree to escape a herd of peccaries

It happened at Rincón del Socorro, inside the wetlands. The jaguar is called Jasy'i and the video of the scene travelled across the country.

Emiliano Donadío, scientific director of Fundación Rewilding Argentina, explained why a predator ends up in a tree: jaguars hunt peccaries by surprise, but a herd of peccaries fights back and is dangerous.