The Central West: Space Age cities and Jaguars in the Wild

Brazil’s Central West is South America’s gold-standard wildlife destination and the only place on Earth where you can near-guarantee seeing jaguars, in the Pantanal. This Unesco-listed, Ramsar-protected wetland is larger than Great Britain. There’s a lot more wildlife here too – giant anteaters, South America’s ostrich-equivalent – the rhea, caiman crocodiles by the thousands, other cats (from moggy-sized jaguarundi to labrador-sized ocelot) and birds everywhere – raptors on every other fence post, metre-long indigo-blue macaws nesting in the ipê trees, man-sized jabiru storks and tiny hummingbirds.

In Nobres and Bonito you can swim through aquarium clear rivers teeming with fish and stingrays, and in the coutnry’s Jetson Age capital Brasilia (the gateway city to the region) you ill feel tiny next to Oscar Niemeyer’s monumental-marble-white geometric buildings.