In the World’s Best Place to See Wild Jaguars, Residents Are Using the Big Cat’s Appeal to Reach Conservation Goals

Jaju is on the prowl. Her agile shoulders glide above the river until she suddenly pounces for a kill, whipping her spotted body around in a windmill of droplets. But when she emerges again, her jaws are empty. “The caiman saw her first,” says my guide, Adjalma “DJ” Oliveira.

To be honest, I’m not too disappointed. Jaju was already the third jaguar I’d seen that October morning and one of 11 I saw during a weeklong tour of the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland, which stretches roughly 81,000 square miles across parts of Bolivia, Paraguay and the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul. Most of those jaguars were stalking the São Lourenço River in southwestern Brazil’s Porto Jofre, looking to capture capybaras or caimans along its shores.

Typically, jaguars are elusive. In much of their range—from Arizona down to Brazil—they have been hunted to near extinction or their habitat has been destroyed by humans. But in Porto Jofre’s Encontro das Águas State Park, tourists regularly encounter jaguars swimming and rolling onto their backs, seemingly without a care.

“They’re huge, they’re jumping from trees, they’re healthy,” says Paul Raad, founder of the Impacto Institute, a Brazilian nonprofit that focuses on jaguar conservation through coexistence with cattle ranchers.

Across much of the Pantanal and beyond, cattle ranchers kill jaguars—often as retaliation if they believe a cat killed one of their cows. But in the Porto Jofre area, Raad says, “people are paying millions per year to see them, so why would people kill a jaguar?”

The jaguars’ presence is good news for the Pantanal’s ecosystem, which includes more than 650 bird species along with giant otters and giant anteaters. “Where there’s a jaguar, that means the environment is very well balanced, because they’re at the top,” says Oliveira.

But outside the most touristed zones, jaguars’ safety is far from guaranteed. And even where tourism thrives, overcrowding threatens to disrupt the animals’ behavior or diminish visitors’ experiences. Nevertheless, conservationists hope that the successful protection of jaguars in Porto Jofre, often called “Jaguar Land,” can encourage ranchers in other areas to coexist with the big cats. The felines, they argue, are more valuable when kept alive.

Jaguars under threat

Before European colonization in the 16th century, jaguars had only Indigenous hunters to reckon with. But Portuguese and Spanish settlers who used the Pantanal’s vast plains for cattle grazing were less than tolerant when a jaguar snagged one of their calves or horses—and they would respond with revenge killings, just as many ranchers do today. In much of the 20th century, jaguars were also captured and killed by sport hunters.

Brazil’s 1967 ban on sport hunting had a significant impact on jaguar preservation, conservationists say. Still, the immense sparseness of the Pantanal, and the fact that more than 90 percent of its land is privately owned, makes prosecuting jaguar killings a challenge. “The ranches are sometimes 10,000 acres, 40,000 acres. If the person wants to kill a jaguar, they just bury it underground,” says Raad. “You have no way to find that.”

Jaguars also face threats from gold mining, which can poison water sources, and wildfires, many sparked by ranch clearing blazes that grow out of control and consume swaths of the region. One of the most devastating wildfire seasons in decades left the Pantanal scorched in 2024, and climate change makes such extreme events more likely.

In 2020, a jaguar named Ousado had to be rescued and rehabilitated after a wildfire burned his paws. Images of the animal with all four feet bandaged up made headlines. “He is Brazil’s most famous jaguar,” says Abbie Martin, founder of the citizen science nonprofit the Jaguar ID Project, who frequently sees Ousado in the wild.

Martin, an American who was 22 when she first came to the Pantanal in 2013, witnessed wildfires in 2023 and recorded an emotional plea for help. “My friends and volunteers were, like, fighting mega fires with garden hoses,” she says.

The hope for Martin and many other conservationists is that as greater attention is given to jaguars through tourism, the government and private landowners will do more to conserve the Pantanal. “The value of a live jaguar in the area is way, way more,” she says.

Pulling the “jaguar lever”

When American ornithologist Charles Munn, a former field scientist for the New York Zoological Society (now the Wildlife Conservation Society), first came to the Pantanal in 1987, it was to study birds. But ultimately, the jaguars caught his eye—and he was especially surprised by their relaxed nature in the presence of humans. “I could not explain it,” he says.

Soon, he realized that the absence of sport hunting, along with an abundance of fishermen on Porto Jofre’s rivers, some of whom were feeding the jaguars, had acclimated the big cats to humans. That gave Munn an idea. “If I pull on the jaguar lever,” he recalls thinking, “I can produce more conservation than I can by showcasing the most amazing, colorful birds.”

Munn started the jaguar safari operator SouthWild in Porto Jofre in 2005 and guaranteed that guests on at least a three-day tour would see a jaguar. “A lot of people didn’t take me seriously,” Munn says. “They thought this was a kind of joke and kind of silly, but I don’t think they consider that a joke anymore.”

Two decades later, jaguar ecotourism is booming in Jaguar Land, as well as in the Southern Pantanal. In the first four months of 2025, Mato Grosso, where Porto Jofre is located, saw 260,391 visitors, up from 234,628 during the same period in 2024.

To improve tour quality and establish empathetic connections with the animals, Martin’s nonprofit, the Jaguar ID Project, names and records jaguars with the help of contributions from tourists, guides, lodges and boat drivers. So far, they’ve identified 450 jaguars, and Martin estimates that the Pantanal’s total jaguar population could be between 4,000 and 7,000. “Even though our team is really small—we’re only four people—we have been able to have the largest demographic database of jaguars,” she says.

Some conservationists have raised concerns that overtourism in Jaguar Land could disturb the cats’ hunts or mating behavior. Researchers have warned that jaguar tourism is becoming so prolific that without further regulation, the industry’s very success could spark its own collapse. When one guide spots a jaguar, they often report the sighting via radio to other guides, who take their tourists to the area, creating crowds of potentially a dozen boats.

Martin argues that overtourism can be resolved with restrictions on the number of boats allowed to operate and by encouraging captains to spread out. “In Porto Jofre, we can see 15 different jaguars in seven different rivers,” she says. “Go up the river, you’ll find your own cat, and you’ll be all alone, and it’ll be a magical experience.”

Another concern with jaguar tourism is that encounters could endanger humans. Although no attacks on tourists have occurred in Porto Jofre, Martin says she would like to see more precautions to avoid potential tragedies, including adding floating bathrooms in the river so that visitors don’t have to disembark their boats in jaguar territory. “I encountered a jaguar on foot twice getting out of the boat to go to the bathroom,” she says.

In April 2025, ranch caretaker Jorge Ávila was killed by a jaguar in the Southern Pantanal state of Mato Grosso do Sul. “That was an avoidable tragedy,” says Munn, adding that the attack was an exception, as the jaguar was old and starving. “You have to take precautions and be systematic. But the notion that top predators are going to kill you right away turns out not to be true.”

Working with ranchers for conservation

Outside Porto Jofre, protecting jaguars is far more difficult. Areas far from waterways don’t have easy sites for jaguar-spotting, and ranchers in these regions go about their business without any international visitors around.

“In terms of conservation, [Porto Jofre] is like a little sand grain in the middle of the desert,” says Raad. And if Porto Jofre is a paradise for jaguars, beyond it is “hell,” he adds. “We lose jaguars every year to retaliation.”

Raad, a Uruguayan veterinarian, has spent years working with ranchers to minimize retaliatory jaguar killings. He was invited to the Pantanal in 2002 by the owners of Pousada Piuval, a ranch with 2,200 cows across 18,000 acres in Poconé, a three-hour drive north of Porto Jofre. The owners were hoping to offer jaguar tourism on their property. “They’re really good businesspeople, and they said: If we have jaguars, we don’t want our neighbors to kill them, because that will also affect our tourism, so let’s bring a scientist,” he says.

Initially, Raad had reservations about collaborating with ranchers. “I’m a vegetarian; I never wanted to work with cattle ranching,” he says. But he came to believe that “saving the cattle ranchers is the way to save the jaguar.”

Now, he educates ranchers about the benefits of jaguars, whether to tourism or to the ecosystem. He also uses his veterinarian skills to provide autopsies of dead cattle, proving that, sometimes, jaguars aren’t to blame. “I call myself the detective of jaguars,” Raad says. “CSI: Jaguar.”

Jaguars—which have the strongest bite of the world’s big cats, relative to their size—kill their prey with a bite to the head. So, if a cow was bitten elsewhere first, it could have died from natural causes. “The fact that [a jaguar] ate the cow doesn’t mean he killed the cow,” says Raad.

Raad also advocates for ranchers to use electric fences to keep the cats away from livestock, and he studies parasites in jaguar feces, demonstrating how the predators control populations of animals that carry dangerous tapeworms.

The goal of his work is to reduce conflict between ranchers and jaguars, resulting in fewer retaliatory killings of the big cats—and so far, it appears to be working. Since he began his nonprofit, Impacto Institute, Raad says, cattle deaths in the area around Pousada Piuval have dropped by 83 percent. “If it worked here, it can work in any other ranch,” he says.

At Pousada Piuval, I embark on a safari jeep tour, on the lookout for tapirs and giant anteaters. As we scour cattle fields and human-size termite mounds—high enough that their tops stay above water during the wet season—my guide, Benedito Almeida dos Santos, answers the radio with a frantic look on his face: A jaguar was spotted nearby. “Oh my God guys, cross fingers please,” Santos says.

As dusk sweeps over the Pantanal, we speed past the termite mounds to a field, and Santos spots not just one jaguar but three: Nina, a 9-year-old female dubbed the “queen of the Pantanal,” along with two cubs. “I love nature,” Santos says with a laugh.

As we head to our accommodation, we pass a group of capybaras that would make a fine meal for Nina and her cubs. This time, I’m a little disappointed—I would’ve loved to see a kill. But after a week in the Pantanal, watching jaguars stalk the riverbanks and meeting the conservationists fighting to keep them alive, I’m mostly just grateful to have seen wild jaguars at all.