The LANDED Podcast

Fito Alvarado was born in a small town of western Honduras, within the ruins of the world-famous Maya archaeological site of Copan. His father was a truck driver, and his mother was a cook at the only tourist hotel in town. Fito spent his childhood playing between the ruins of this ancient Maya kingdom.

Over the years, he has witnessed many of the discoveries made during the excavations at the site. At age 15 he began guiding visitors of the ruins on weekends. Those interactions helped him learn English. 

After completing high school Fito studied at IBM Honduras, graduating with accreditations in computer programming and software design. He began studies in industrial engineering at the national University at Tegucigalpa. On school breaks he traveled home to continue guiding at the Maya ruins. That contrast made clear that his passions were Maya culture and the natural world. He left the capital to dedicate his life to guiding. 

Fito has trained in tourism, nature, archaeology and history. He has a gift for language, and is conversant in English, Spanish and Italian. His work has taken him site across the Maya world, from Mexico to Panama.

Find the transcript below

Fito Alvarado, it’s so good to talk to you again.

Nice to hear from you, John. A pleasure.

Do you know it was 20 years ago that I met you in Copán?

Is it hard to believe? Time flies.

Yes, hard to believe. I was looking at pictures of the time that we brought our girls to Copán. The oldest one is married now.

Wow, time flies. Oh my god.

Yeah. Fito, you’re from Copán Ruinas.

Yes, you’re right. I’m from Copán. I was born and raised here.

I love that town.

Yeah, me too. It’s a nice town.

When I met you, we did a tour together. We started in Quiriguá, and then we went to Copán.

I remember that. Normally the two sites are visited together, Quiriguá and Copán.

I have great memories of Copán. What makes it so special for you as a native?

Well, there’s so much about it. The fact that Copán is the southernmost of the Maya, but it’s also the southernmost border of Mesoamerica, which is this cultural region grouping all the maize-farming, the corn-farming societies of this part of the world. Copán, for instance, in the past, the Maya of Copán were the only ones that were able to interact with non-Maya, but they were able also to interact with non-maize farmers who were making a life mostly out of hunting and gathering. And some of them that had a little bit of agriculture were growing root crops rather than maize. And this is very interesting because the Maya of the rest of the lands never had that interaction with anybody different, but only Mesoamericans or Mayans around them. So that makes Copán very special, and we still have some of those cultural characteristics and differences with the neighbors in the rest of Honduras. We notice it even today. So imagine far back during the Classic Maya, that was more accentuated than today.

Were those Lenca people?

Yes, some of them are what we call Lenca today. Most of those people were interacting with the Maya and trying to copy some of the things the Maya did. For instance, in some of their pottery, we can see details that try to imitate Maya iconography, but in reality it’s not Maya, or some kind of glyphs that look like Maya glyphs, but they are not Maya glyphs. Copán and the Maya were like the big superpowers at that time in this part of Honduras. So the rest of the people were from different linguistic families. Maybe the most dominant today in the rest of Honduras and a big part of the north of El Salvador is what we call the Lenca.

And if I remember right, there is evidence on site that Copán interacted with Tikal and probably with El Mirador.

Yes, Copán and Tikal had a very interesting relationship. It’s archaeologically proven that the Copán monarchic system was established by the Tikal royal family. Archaeological evidence points out Copán like a younger brother of Tikal. It is possible that back at that time Tikal was trying to stretch its control. Maybe in this area the major attraction was to control the areas where jade was extracted. So Copán is different to the rest of the Maya world because most of the Maya cities you see in the Classic period were settled in the base of the Yucatán Peninsula or in the Yucatán Peninsula itself, so there’s a lot of limestone. But there were no volcanic stones that were needed at that time for their tool making or jewelry making, like obsidian and jade.

Right, obsidian and jade.

So we have nearby obsidian quarries and also jade quarries in what is eastern Guatemala today, relatively close to Copán. So probably that was motivating the elite of Tikal to execute some control of this part of the Maya world, with Copán being so far south.

So the time period of Copán…

All the Copán monarchic system is taking place within the Maya Classic period, between 250 AD up to 900 AD. But the Copán monarchy itself runs from around 420 AD to around 820 or 822 AD. So let me say that the monarchy of Copán lasted around 400 years. Although there is archaeological evidence showing permanent occupation of Copán dating far back to 1500 BC, in a time when the communities that were settled here were those hunters and gatherers transitioning into agriculture, probably a very early stage of discovering agriculture in this part of the Maya world.

And that was primarily maize.

Maize was the main element through the success of this culture. But in that very early stage, they were domesticating other plants as well. Probably one of the very first plants to be domesticated was maize, some sort of proto-beans, and some types of squashes. But there were others that were very helpful for them. One of them is the calabash or the gourd tree. That was probably one of the very first ones to be domesticated as well. And very often the gourd tree appears in the iconography of Maya mythology.

I’m curious, being a border region, do we find evidence that the people of Copán traded crops or plants that came all the way from South America, like cacao?

Not from South America. Perishable materials, grain for instance, would be very hard to trade over far distances since the transportation technology of the Maya was basically walking or dugout canoeing when possible. But there are certain objects that were found in Copán that prove contact with far south in Central America. Some of those pieces were little pieces of gold that were here for a little while on display in a little museum, but they were robbed from the museum.

Oh, Fito. Being from Copán, do you feel a family connection to this culture?

Definitely, yes. Part of my ancestry was Maya from here, ***Maya Ch’orti’***, but part of my family was of Spanish origin. So my family is mestizo. My grandfather used to be one of the workers in the archaeological project. So I was visiting the site every week. He used to teach all of his grandchildren about the ruins, and he proudly made sketches of things and told us stories about the site. So yeah, we grew up understanding that that is like our ancient home.

When was the Copán Park created?

The Copán archaeological site comes out officially back in 1952. That was the time most of the major archaeological projects were finishing and restoring the temples and trying to stabilize most of the infrastructure. When the institutions handed over the project—in this case it was the Carnegie archaeological project—they decided to hand the site officially to the government of Honduras. For that purpose, the government of Honduras created an institute, the Institute of Anthropology and History, to protect the site of Copán and also protect all the rest of the historical monuments of the country. And that’s the time, 1952, when the Copán archaeological site came to life as a protected area.

Was your grandfather involved in the creation of the park?

My grandfather was part of the working staff at that time. What happened too is that most of those people who were working in the excavation processes were hired by the Institute of Anthropology to continue protecting the site as guards. That was one of the suggestions of the archaeological mission in order to create sustainability: they said, “You should incorporate the people who were working at the site. Let’s give them the job of protecting it now.”

So you grew up learning about the site, visiting there, spending time with your family, and it’s right outside of town. I mean, it’s a 10-minute walk from the center of town.

The main archaeological site is half a mile from town. But what was discovered, John, is that the archaeological site that was first protected back in 1952 was only the center of the ancient city. As mapping projects started and people began to report the existence of ruined buildings on their properties, we started little by little to understand that the city in the past was actually occupying the totality of the valley, occupying the hilltops and the areas where modern town of Copán is built now. So we realized that the city in the past was actually bigger than the town today.

Were any of the buildings in town, like maybe the church, built on top of Maya structures?

Yes, you’re right. The church that was originally built in the middle of town was originally only mud with a thatch roof. There was a British explorer, Maudslay, who documented that part of a Maya altar was embedded in the main altar of that early church. Little by little, that mud-wall church was rebuilt and made larger, and for that purpose they used building materials from the temples that were adjacent. Some of that can be seen today when you’re looking at the main church in town. Facing it to the left-hand side, just around the corner on the left, there is a little piece of plaster missing and you can see the stone walls that are the same stone blocks of ancient Maya temples. The architect who remodeled the church decided to leave it like that as a “window to the past,” she said.

So the main site that was discovered and protected in the early 1950s, that’s where we go now to see the Rosalila temple, the stelae, the hieroglyphic staircase.

Yes, correct. That archaeological area, the main site as we call it today, is where we have the hieroglyphic staircase, the Acropolis containing the Rosalila building, the ball court, and the Great Plaza of the stelae. That was originally reported for the very first time by a Spanish explorer back in 1576 to the King of Spain. There was not much interest at that time. It was not until the 1800s, starting in the early 1800s, when explorers and archaeological missions started working on it.

And one of the unique features of Copán is that there are temples nested inside newer temples, and the tunnels that are accessible allow you to view walls of these earlier temples.

Correct. It is something you could do in Copán, and it’s one of the few sites where you can see this. But there’s something here, John: those tunnels were made by archaeologists as part of the archaeological work. They were not made in ancient times. Sometimes this connection is made because we see the pyramids in Egypt with tunnels and galleries inside and think Maya pyramidal temples are similar, but in reality, no. In this case, the very first archaeological projects were conducted between 1895 through the final creation of the archaeological site back in 1952. All of those works were dedicated to restoring the buildings and trying to stabilize the masonry still in situ. A lot of masonry was buried by large portions of the highest parts of the buildings. So by cleaning and restoring, they finished the work on the surface of the site and started trying to intervene in the interior of those pyramidal buildings, and this is when tunnels came about. There was evidence of constructive layers underneath what we were seeing at that time, and Carnegie Archaeological Mission back in 1940 made one of the first tunneling projects on the north side of Temple 11. They worked their way through it, documented an early staircase and an early temple inside—there’s a funeral chamber inside, by the way. Later on in the 1980s and 1990s, nearly 4 kilometers of tunnels were made by different archaeological missions. So those are the tunnels you see today. Copán is one of the few sites where you can actually visit the tunnels and see the type of work archaeologists conducted in the interior, and see masonry of buildings that easily predate by a couple of centuries the buildings you see on the surface. That makes Copán very special.

Were these changes made to the existing pyramids because of dynastic changes or changes in religion?

Well, primarily these changes were made to adapt the infrastructure to the demands of the city. One thing to understand is that the major Maya kingdoms of the Classic period came about through decisions made unconsciously over a very long period of time. They were not really planned cities. What we see is the progression of very early settlements—dating back to 1500 BC in the Copán Valley—that started to master agriculture. They started to increase their agricultural output little by little, gathering more people and becoming attractive to bands moving through that saw Copán growing up and joined them. As the population grew, the demand for infrastructure for administrative and religious purposes also grew, and this is when more recent kings decided to dismantle previous temples and make new ones. But we see a constant line where their religious beliefs were retained. The newest buildings were just bigger, more elaborate versions of the previous ones. Sometimes they actually reused square blocks of previous buildings, and sometimes stone carvings were embedded in a newer version like relics of previous temples exposed in the new ones.

You know, we’ve spent some time in Egypt and we saw the temples there. It was mostly erasure of the previous dynasty and replacement with the current kings. But that’s not the case in Copán.

Not necessarily. For some kings, it was really very hard to make a newer version of a temple, especially if they ruled for short periods of time. One thing kings did do was discard monuments depicting previous rulers. That was a tradition all over: Maya kings ceremoniously terminated depictions on stelae and altars of the previous king and buried them, so the new king would have a clean canvas in the city landscape to start adding his own. That is something that also happened among the Maya.

So Copán’s function was primarily agricultural. Is that how it began? And it must have changed over time.

The origin of Copán, with occupation going so far back, was surely agricultural. But at the peak of development during the 8th century AD, Copán was no longer a farming society. Copán was occupied by a society that was highly specialized and deeply stratified—masons, stone carvers, weavers, bureaucrats, architects. Evidently Copán was not self-sustainable. Copán needed a farming periphery, and this is where Quiriguá started to play a very important role. Quiriguá, which as the crow flies is about 50 kilometers north of Copán, became the major food provider for Copán. Copán was sponsored by the agricultural production of Quiriguá. So Copán lost its agricultural essence and became a major urban center that had a huge area under economic and political control.

Yeah. The level of the stonework at Copán is, I think, unmatched in anything I’ve seen in the Mayan world, up into Chiapas, the Yucatán, across Belize, Guatemala, and El Salvador. I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as what I’ve seen in Copán.

You’re right. It might sound like a very biased opinion because I’m from here, but leaving my heart aside, I agree with you definitely. And I would go beyond: I think that in pre-Hispanic times on our continent, there was nothing comparable to the stone carving in Copán—the three-dimensionality, the richness of details, and that artistic obsession for leaving no blank spaces. It actually has no match on the whole continent. Although there are other Maya sites whose carving I love and that rival Copán, like Quiriguá—Quiriguá’s stone carving is also spectacular, the size of the hieroglyphics on their monuments is amazing, with beautiful calligraphy there. Also the site called Piedras Negras in Guatemala near the border with Mexico. Those sites rival Copán in stone carving.

It’s true what you say about the three-dimensionality and expressiveness when I think of some of the stelae in the main plazas in Copán—and you see this in Quiriguá as well. The delicacy of the gestures of the hands especially is remarkable.

Yes, on a couple of their monuments you can see that the stone carver was depicting the king in a very gracious, very natural way, looking as if stone carvers of Copán were capable of making a fully round standing image of the ruler. There are a couple of them that were just a couple of inches away from going all the way around the legs depicting the full roundness, but they didn’t do it—maybe because they needed a board on the back for the hieroglyphic inscription. Otherwise, they might have been able to make an image like Michelangelo’s David.

Which stelae or monuments are your favorites at Copán?

It’s very hard to choose one. I have several carvings I like. The quality of Stela H is really spectacular—I love the depiction of the king, the beauty of it, the religious iconography, and the mythological characters embedded together. But I like Altar Q as well. Even though Altar Q is not the prettiest, the information it contains is so important in understanding the history of the city. Even though the aesthetic quality is not as impressive, I’d put it among my favorites. But if I have to choose only one, I’ll say Temple 22. It’s a temple that interestingly is mounted over a platform inspired by Teotihuacán, the ruined city northeast of modern Mexico City. That city exerted influence on Maya royal houses in early stages, and it was common for Maya royal families to show affiliation with Teotihuacán. Temple 22 is one of them, although while the bottom is Teotihuacano, the upper part is pure Maya. The iconography declares the place to be a man-made mountain where humans have the chance to interact with divinities, done in an exquisite way. There are nearly 2,000 stone blocks that were carved individually to make the huge composition of the facade and roof comb of that building. That was one of the most spectacular temples at its time in the whole Maya world. That would be my favorite by far.

When I think of the iconography of Teotihuacán, when I think of jaguars, are they evidenced in Copán?

Interestingly, there are some jaguars in Copán and icons associated with Teotihuacán. One of them is the so-called “goggle eyes”—circles around the eyes used by people showing affiliation with Teotihuacán.

When I think of the statues I’ve seen of Copán’s first ruler, he has those goggle eyes.

He has that exactly! He appears depicted with those characteristics on the altar in his funerary temple, and on the last of his funerary temples. He appears wearing that. There are also pottery pieces, incense burners depicting him in that fashion, and carvings on the famous hieroglyphic staircase. That’s one of the icons clearly making a connection with Teotihuacán as well.

What do we understand or translate on the hieroglyphic staircase?

This is a very interesting monument. Sadly, the monument was found almost entirely collapsed, and there was no way to reconstruct the original sequence of the text. Back in 1895, only the first 15 steps were in situ. Later, archaeological projects made a reconstruction of the whole hieroglyphic staircase, so it’s very hard to read. Another challenge is that the mortar used for the reconstruction project had a corrosive effect on the stone, destroying most of the hieroglyphic inscriptions. So it is challenging to decipher, but archaeologists using modern technology have a general understanding of the inscription, and it seems to compile great military episodes in the history of Copán. The reason why this monument was dedicated seems to be that the royal family was trying to step out of a very embarrassing incident: the death of their 13th king by the ruler of Quiriguá. The hieroglyphic inscriptions in Quiriguá celebrate that—they celebrate that the 13th King of Copán, their overlord, was abducted and killed in the year 738 AD. So it seems the successors of this beheaded king of Copán tried to revive the prestige of their family by dedicating a military monument depicting themselves in military garb for the very first time, changing the narrative of Copán artistry from rulers as divinities to rulers as warriors.

Fito, has LiDAR been used in Copán or in any other areas within Honduras, and have they made discoveries of additional sites or components of the city?

Yes, LiDAR was used in Copán some years ago, but the use of LiDAR in Copán didn’t really bring much new information. LiDAR shows all of its power and benefits in places where dense vegetation covers archaeological remains, like Tikal and the northern Guatemala peninsula. LiDAR revealed a lot of temples we didn’t know existed in that area. But in Copán, LiDAR didn’t reveal much new because Copán is maybe the best-mapped Maya site of all the Maya lowlands. There is a new technology being used in Copán—Copán is the first Maya site to use it—which involves devices measuring subatomic particles (muons) that can penetrate to considerable depth. Kyushu University’s archaeological project is placing tools to measure subatomic particles blasting through one of the buildings. By measuring that, we can make an X-ray image of the temple to see if there is a void or chamber, allowing us to intervene directly into the chamber rather than blindly trenching or tunneling as was done in the 1990s. That is state-of-the-art technology being used now.

The city flourished for four centuries, and then the collapse seems to have been fairly rapid. What are thoughts about what caused the collapse?

It is very interesting. Copán’s collapse seems to be connected to the death of the 13th king. When we analyze the history of Copán through artistic creations, we see that the reign of the 13th king—formerly known as “18 Rabbit”, though now we know his name should be 18 Times Cowil / Lightning God in Maya—ruled 42 years, and those years were the pinnacle of artistry. But surprisingly, immediately after his death, his successors really struggled to dedicate monuments in public. Whenever we see a reduction in the output and quality of art, it is the product of stress and crisis. We believe that since the 13th king was killed, allegedly by decapitation in Quiriguá, that was a heavy blow to the political structure of the city. The Copán royal family lost prestige and power. But the most important thing, John, is that Copán lost its biggest taxpayer. Remember, the little farming community that was successful here lost its self-sustainability when it became a city a millennium later. The city needed enormous amounts of resources and energy to sustain an urban population estimated at over 25,000 people. When you have such a large demand for resources and your nearest breadbasket, Quiriguá, turns its back on you, you’re in real trouble. So we believe the royal family couldn’t maintain sustainability. Archaeological evidence shows that the death of the 13th king was the watershed in the history of the city, and after he died, everything went into a steep decline.

So their military propaganda, their staircase building, didn’t win the day.

Exactly. That was like that very embarrassing press conference you have to give after a big mistake.

One of the most special memories I have from Copán is you and your connection to the macaws on site. Can you tell us about that?

Oh, the Scarlet Macaws! Well, yes, Scarlet Macaws are spectacular. Most people visiting the ruins now go to see the birds first and then the ruins, rather than the other way around! I love birds—I’m not an expert birdwatcher, but I love them, and Scarlet Macaws are national symbols in Honduras. Beyond that, they appear often in mythological depictions in Maya artistry as an impersonator of the sun god. We have a healthy community of Scarlet Macaws living now in the Copán Valley. By the time you were here 20 years ago, the repopulation project was in its early stages. At this point, Scarlet Macaws have been reproduced in captivity from former pets, and their offspring released into the valley. We have more than 200 Scarlet Macaws living in the Copán Valley now, and we have a third generation of Scarlet Macaws born in the wild. The project is very successful—they are everywhere nowadays.

They’re a little noisy.

Yeah, a little! Nature is very fair, you see: beautiful birds have very ugly calls, and dull-colored birds are great singers!

What are some of the most special memories you remember in your many visits to Copán with travelers?

There’s something I witnessed that was a very special occasion. It was in 2012—maybe you remember the so-called Maya prophecy end-of-calendar year. There was a time when the archaeological site was open for visiting during the nighttime, which has occurred in Copán only twice in history. For that occasion, a couple who had met while traveling came back to Copán as the place where their love story started, and they actually got married in the Acropolis of Copán. It was conducted by a Maya spiritual leader. That’s something I will never forget—it always comes to mind as something very special.

If people want to understand more about the Copán Valley and Maya culture, are there books you would recommend?

Yes, several! Maybe the best book to start getting acquainted with Maya culture is The Maya by Michael D. Coe. I recommend it because it starts with descriptions of landscape, flora, and fauna, and little by little goes into the depth of Maya civilization and how complex features evolved, including a section dedicated to Copán. It’s fabulous to read, not full of thick technical jargon. Another book I recommend to understand the Maya in general and Copán is a translation of the Popol Vuh, the ancient Maya book of creation found in Chichicastenango, Guatemala. The translation I highly recommend was done by Dennis Tedlock from SUNY Buffalo. It’s a fantastic book connecting Maya agriculture, mythology, and ball courts as playing a crucial role in daily life. And to understand the stonework and iconography of Copán specifically, the book Sculptures of Copán by Barbara Fash, which has up-to-date information about iconography and stone carving.

When I think of visiting Honduras, Copán is always high on my list. Are there other locations in Honduras you think shouldn’t be missed?

Honduras offers a very good variety of nature. Archaeological sites beyond Copán are modest, but you can visit national parks with great trails—along the north coast in the area of Pico Bonito, for instance. Lake Yojoa has also been upgraded in infrastructure with national parks and community members offering ecolodges and local guides, especially for birdwatchers. Honduras also offers the Bay Islands on the barrier reef, such as Roatán, Utila, or the Cayos Cochinos on the north coast—beautiful places that make a great combination with Copán. The central highlands also offer Maya-Lenca communities that are very picturesque, where you can see countryside life isolated from modern development.

You have a beautiful country. I’ll always have good memories of sitting with you and my family overlooking the river from Hacienda San Lucas in the evening while the sun goes down, or visiting the bird park with my children. Thank you for those memories. My kids still argue about who deserves the stick you gave them—you offered them a stick with a macaw feather on top, and that was a coveted treasure for my girls.

Wow! It’s amazing to realize that was 20 years ago and they are all grown up now.

They’re all grown up. Thank you, Fito. Thank you for the visit and your kind words.

It really makes me happy to see that you have these memories of my town, the site that I love so much, and of me. So thank you very much.

Juan Pablo Culasso is a master interpreter of the natural world. Through his field recordings, he takes listeners deep into wild spaces: the Atlantic Rainforest of Argentina, the cloud forests of Colombia, the Brazilian Pantanal, and coastal lagoons of his native Uruguay. Entering these soundscapes is immersive, transportive, and invigorating.

Juan Pablo trained under Jaques Vielliard, curator of the Neotropical Bird Sound Archive at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil. Later, he studied nature sound recording at Cornell University’s Ornithology Lab. He’s become one of the largest contributors to the Macaulay Library—the premier scientific archive of natural history media. With more than 20 years of experience, Juan Pablo’s expertise as a sonic curator of avian environments is unparalleled.

Juan Pablo has an acutely musical ear and an astonishing memory. Barred from pursuing a traditional biology degree due to barriers in Latin American education, he trained himself to distinguish countless bird species by ear. This talent helped him win National Geographic’s “Superbrains” competition in 2014.

In 2024, he was named to The Explorers Club 50, honored as a “Bioacoustic Engineer & Accessibility Advocate” for reframing exploration as a multisensory practice (one built on listening rather than looking) and for his work making the natural world more accessible to people with visual impairments.

He writes, “In a world where nature is often forgotten or harmed, these recordings remind us of what we could lose. They’re not just sounds; they’re the voices of places that need our protection. I’ve been recording the sounds of different habitats, from the rainforest to the Antarctic. Sadly, some of the pristine soundscapes I recorded do not exist anymore.”

Juan Pablo lives in Bogotá with his wife, Sara (an avid birder) and his dog Alegra.

You can find his work on Spotify

Find the transcript below

Well, Juan Pablo, let’s introduce you to our listeners. You’re from Uruguay, but you live in Colombia. You started recording and became interested in the sounds of nature at a young age. You’re from Hawaii, but you live in Colombia. You started recording and became interested in the sounds of nature at a young age.

Yeah. When I was 16 years old, I had the chance to go on a field expedition with a biologist in my country, Uruguay. And one of them gave me a recorder, a microphone, and basically he said, “Here’s the record button, the play button, the stop button. Try to record something.” And the very first sound that I captured with the microphone was a Kingfisher, and that Kingfisher really changed my mind in a really amazing way.

It was a really warm day in Uruguay in January 2003, in the west of the country near the Uruai River. We were searching for migratory birds, seed eaters. They are extremely endangered because the grasslands that they use to feed on are disappearing, and we tried to really find those tiny birds. A beautiful expedition, four or five days searching, listening, was my very first time with professionals of nature in the field. And when I got that recorder, a cassette recorder on my shoulder, got my microphone in my hand, and pressed the record button, I was beginning to listen to that sound through headphones. It was really so nice because in that time, John, from my perspective, understanding the world through sounds was my way to really understand what’s around me. But listening through headphones with a microphone and focusing on a bird was so nice. And I asked biologist Santiago, “What do I need to do to become a biologist or become a nature passion or a thing like that?” And he said, “You need to study biology.” Well, my life pushed me in other ways, but in the end, I really got that trophy and dedicated my life to recording nature and conserving our sound heritage.

You’ve trained now in Brazil and also done work with the Cornell Ornithology Lab.

Yes, yes. To your audience, basically, on the surface, there is a lot of discrimination against blind people in education. So I need to learn most of the things by myself. Of course, I had the chance to know amazing people along the way in Brazil, of course in Campinas at UNICAMP with Jack Villar [Jacques Vielliard], and then amazing people in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. I got a lot of knowledge from them. Finally, I give that knowledge to other people like me who cannot study using the mainstream, using the main way. So that’s the thing. Nature gave me a lot of things, gave me a lot of knowledge, gave me the chance to know our world, and now I’m trying to do the same thing to my community.

You’ve become a major contributor to the Macaulay library. Which is probably the most important library of nature sounds.

Yes, yes. I contribute to Macaulay because in the neotropics, even in my country, Uruguay, there are not too many recordings or register of sounds. Macaulay, even today, 70% of the sounds are from North America, and I think that here in South America we have one of the most amazing treasures that is: 66% of the bird species are here.

So it’s really nice because here we have a lot of sounds, a lot of forest, a lot of things to record. And as you know, John, in every 100 photographers, only one sound recordist. So we are a bit of a rare species in the world that really puts the sound in the center of the story. To be sorry for the filmmakers, but filmmakers put the footage, the image, in the center of the story: 4K, 8K, but the sound is always in a secondary way. Nature recordists like me, even with my—again, I don’t like to talk too much about that—but my disability allows me to really understand basically what’s around me, understand the perspective of the forest, to understand what the forest is saying to us, is telling a message, is saying something. So with my microphones, I try to go there and capture and record that kind of music. I think, put that music or those sounds in a different series of actions to really put those nature sounds together for the people, you know. Most documentaries or things like that are really focused on images. Today, attention to sounds is growing really, really slowly, but this conversation regarding sound recordists, the importance, the priority of that- I’m talking to that, I don’t know, maybe 15 years ago or 20 years ago. So I’m so happy that this conversation is really going to the table, but it’s really, really going so slowly, and we are losing that ecosystem; we are losing, to a really high degree, that kind of music today because of habitat change or things like that, human noises. I say to you, it’s like an invisible loss. You are not really aware of how much we are losing our soundscape. And this is so sad. This is really, really sad. And with my publications on several things, I think that I’m giving the world a bit of that magic because, in my opinion, sound tells you a story, a beautiful story.

My wife and I have been to the Amazon since we last talked. While we were on the canoe, right, away from the motors, away from engine sounds, I took time to close my eyes and to turn on my Zoom recorder and to see what I could see with my ears. I think there are some things about being in a jungle environment that cause you to be able to observe more without your eyes. The green, the leaves, it’s everywhere. And you can’t really penetrate it with your eyes.

It’s basically your brain opening new ways when you visualize things. It’s this thing. But when you start to listen and pay attention and be open to that forest, it’s not common for your brain really to try to interpret what’s happening around you outside. So you are opening a new way in your brain, and I really, I’m 90% sure that that recording that you did with your recorder will be more remarkable than many photographs that you took, because sound really connects you directly with your brain. Images need some interpretation, but sound is, it is what it is. So it’s really, really nice how a soundscape can change the way that you understand where you are. That’s the thing. It’s a great exercise. It’s not easy. You need to learn. It’s a learning curve. Yes. Because you are using your ears. Basically, 90% of people don’t use their ears. Only you use your ears when the energy comes out; you are beginning to listen to a lot of clickings and cracklings and things like that. But in your normal life, you don’t use your ears as much as you can really. So I really believe that soundscapes and nature sounds can allow people to be more sensitive, right? To be more aware of themselves. When you are aware of yourself, you are aware of what’s around you. This is my experience that I can share with you regarding this.

If you want to practice using your ears, go into the forest at night. It’s really nice. The very first time, it’s a little alarming. “What? Why is there so much noise?”

But when you are with someone who can help you to interpret, to understand, you realize there’s more. The other sound I will always remember from this last trip to Peru. We were in Colca, and at one point more than a dozen condors were flying right above us at such a close range that, Pablo, we could hear the sound of the wind in their feathers. I’ve been around, you know, been able to see condors in many places, but I had never heard that. You inspired me.

Let me put this thing in a really more common situation for many people, maybe in the north. I had the chance to listen to a really calm lake in Minnesota, the sound of the tail punching the water, the tail of the beaver. And that sound in the really silent place was really, really, really amazing. So yeah, soundscapes are remarkable because tells you some stories. We did some experiences in some countries in theaters, turning off the lights and putting on 10 minutes of a soundscape, and the memories of the people were really interesting. In 2011, John. Imagine, 2011.

And you had something like 10 minutes with the lights off. In a theater, a crowd of people, and you played soundscapes for them. What did people say to you after?

Well, a lot of memories. Most of them nostalgic memories of the grandfather, grandmother, a little farm that my grandfather really… Yeah. The people were extremely emotional because that woke up emotions. So the energy in that place was so beautiful. A bit heavy, but beautiful at the same time.

Well, you’ve taught me also to use the Merlin app more frequently. I live in the mountains of northern Utah, and I’ll go outside to a quiet area in the woods and turn on the app, and I’ll think I can hear maybe two birds, you know, maybe a Kingfisher or maybe a Magpie, a Robin, but the app can identify maybe six or seven more birds than I’m even realizing I’m hearing. And as you’re using the app, when the bird sings, that name lights up on the screen, so you realize who’s singing, and then it shows you a photo of the bird, so it helps you to recognize it later. It’s an amazing tool, and you’ve contributed to this. Macaulay is part of the Merlin app.

Yes, my sounds are part of Merlin. Yes. And to put the story in the present for the audience to understand, many years ago we really used some CDs or cassettes to memorize the sounds and go outside and try to listen, record things, identify by ourselves. If I didn’t know the sound, we had, for the millennials maybe, Yahoo groups or things like that to share our sounds on platforms. And now today, one of the most common situations that I’ve lived when I do workshops regarding identifying birds by ear, most people say, “No, I don’t have enough of an ear to recognize.” You know, always when you try to teach people a new thing to the people, most of them say, “I’m not sure that I have the ability to do that.” You know, it’s a comfortable answer. But today, with that application, with Merlin, I think that is an amazing tool. Five years ago, six years ago, if you said, “I would like an application to turn on the microphone in my smartphone and identify birds,” most of the answer would really be that that is impossible. So the technology is an amazing tool, is growing so fast. AI models, machine learning things are really allowing people who don’t know nothing about sounds or birds to really enter to this world and really do this more enjoyable for them, and then really the frustration of some people really lower to zero, you know, because for that applications, you need to get some books, really thick books, a lot of pages, a lot of things, and really hard to navigate to in that field guides. But today, it’s really easy to enter this world again. Sorry to be repetitive, but this activity—go to nature, understand what’s around you today—is easier than 5 years ago.

There are still major gaps, though, in South America like you said. In North America, the western US, I can find 100% of the birds, and in South America, we were near 20% of the birds. But you’re making an extra-large challenge for Merlin because Colombia has the highest number of bird species in the world.

And you act as a birding guide. You’re also a sound recordist, a sound designer, in a way, a composer. And you have, I think it’s more than 16 albums on Spotify.

Yeah, 16 albums. Two more albums are coming, highlighting a couple of ecosystems. I’m so happy for that because it’s a dream come true, and yes, I try to highlight extremely endangered ecosystems like in the Chaco in Paraguay—it’s like a really devastating desert; the logging is really hard, it’s horrible—and other ecosystems that really are suffering the same thing. And regarding birding guides, yes, but I don’t like to do this too much because my experience of guiding people listening to birds is a different experience. I don’t like, in Spanish, we say to them “list” or checking lists, you know. These people watch the bird for 5 seconds, that’s it.

Really boring people. I’m so sorry if someone is one of them, and sorry, you are so boring. And I prefer to guide people that wants to know why the bird is singing and when, why the bird is there, you know, to understand the natural story of that place.

If you’ve never observed birds closely, you have so much to look forward to in your life if you start paying attention to them. I just read a book about the history of birds, and that book argues strongly that birds are dinosaurs or dinosaur descendants. And even watching my chickens, Juan Pablo, listening to the sounds they make, watching the way they interact, I’m crazy about birds. And for me, it’s such a memory trigger, too.

Like when I hear a meadowlark or the sandhill cranes that live here, or when I’m in the tropics, oropendolas responding. Like when I hear a Meadowlark or the Sandhill cranes that live here, or when I’m in the tropics, or a pendulas respending, kettles [oropendolas’ responding calls], I’m transported to other moments and memories and people I was with and how I felt, and you know, maybe with my children when they were young. It’s almost the same response that you get from certain smells or perfumes or the smell of cooking, you know, absolutely take you back.

Absolutely, John. My trips with my wife are extremely… when we plan a trip, we try to plan not a visual trip. We try to use our other senses. So, I don’t know, in Spain, we try to go to vineyards to get some wines and cheese and go to different botanical gardens to smell the flowers, go to nice restaurants, enjoy the things. You know, my wife Sara loves arts and things like that, of course, but you know, I get extremely bored when we enter a museum for so many reasons. And I said to her, “Sara, go, and I think for Monet. And I stay in a chair enjoying a cafe and a coffee, and you go and see all the squares and take the photos and take some time in front of every square and things like that.”

You know, we were in Tokyo recently. Not a place where you would think you would find bird life. But in the shrines and also on the city street, there are crows everywhere. So you can find this kind of interaction, this kind of addition to the environment, no matter where you are. That’s a city of 39 million people. I mean, if you can find wildlife to listen to in Tokyo with all the noise and all the chaos, imagine what you can do in your own backyard. And I’ve stopped listening to, oh, let’s call it ambient music while I’m working. You know, it’s repetitive. There’s not really any satisfaction to it. Although it is good for blocking out other sounds that can distract you while you’re trying to write. But what I prefer now is to listen to your sound recordings. They take me somewhere and it’s somehow feeding my need for greater connection with nature. You talked about it as composition or as songs. These really are songs and I’m grateful to you for capturing them.

My idea, John, when I record something is not only to record but recording, you know, it’s like press the right button and, no…

No, it’s not passive. You’re composing. What are some of your favorite bird songs?

My favorite sound, I think, will be published in a couple of months in this new album. One of my diamonds will be there in that album. I prefer not to talk too much, but they are in really extraordinary ecosystems. That choice was even remarkable for me, listening to that soundscape. Really long soundscapes, more than 50 minutes of amazing places in both places. And believe me, you are going to get a time machine and go back 10 million years ago.

These are as rich and as textured as a piano concerto. They’re much more meaningful than some of the ambient or meditation music, spa music that you could be listening to.

That’s the thing, John. I was hired by some reserves because they don’t like ambient music for their spas, for example. They don’t like meditation or things like that because they are really mainstream things. They want… We have some friends in common, John. But that friends is one in a million. And he has the sensitivity to understand the thing. It’s really nice when you have the sound that is around you in a really hard time because most people don’t like to really wake up at 4:30 a.m. to go to the middle of nowhere. It’s understandable. But the magic happens in that time. You know, having this magic at 10:00 a.m. in a beautiful place really increases the experience by a thousand percent. Again, it’s a really new field. Most people don’t understand the idea here of how amazing the sound really performs into the experience of a nature hotel or things like that.

You’ve helped our friends at Mashpi Lodge, at Awasi. You’ve worked with World Wildlife, and I think one of the conservation societies in Paraguay, if I’m not wrong. Juan Pablo, one of the turning points in your early career, I think it was in 2013, you were one of more than 300 applicants for a National Geographic special about people with exceptional abilities. Tell me more about that experience. What did that mean for you?

Until now, I’m telling you amazing things, but of course, in our careers, there are high points and low points. In 2013, I was really almost giving up. And I received the newsletter regarding that show, and I applied with no expectations, of course, never. And well, there were so many people there doing math things or memorizing things. And I was the only crazy person regarding sounds of birds, you know. And yeah, it was a beautiful experience. It was so nice, believing that I was there with no expectations. On the day before the recordings of the show, my guide dog got really sick, and I sent an email to the producer canceling my participation. I said, “I need to cancel because my guide dog is a bit sick and I’m not feeling confident to travel alone.” And they said, “No, Juan Pablo, please think more about that.” Okay, let’s try, and I need to go to the hospital with my dog to understand what’s happening, if the doctor allows me to travel. And in the next morning, I visited the hospital. The doctor did the last exams on her, and yeah, he said, “Yeah, you can travel. Be sure of the medication and things like that.” When I did the first participation, there were two rounds: semi-finals and final. It was extremely amazing, John, because for the very first time my work with nature recording was recognized, you know, because you receive a lot of things: “Ah, Juan Pablo, you’re amazing, amazing, amazing,” but you cannot live or pay your bills with amazings or wonderfuls. Again, I prefer not to talk too much, but most people, when they see a person with a disability, believe that we are extremely sad, depressive, or things like that. Of course, John, we and you and they and them suffer sadness some days, get a bit depressed or things like that. All of us are really… not to be blind or whatever, but when a person watches blind people believes that we are so sad and we cannot do nothing and we are… believe that we are sitting on a chair 24/7 without going outside and things like that. This is the most common thing. It’s an exception to the rule when you really get a person sitting in front of you, and they treat you like a person. When you have the chance to go to a show, and you can perform a different thing, and you really can show the people that you can do things. You can do two things, but well, we live in a society where it’s left or right; nothing is in the middle, you know.

If someone is interested in recording soundscapes, is there some equipment you would recommend?

It’s like in some in all activities. You can do this at an entry-level, medium level, or high level. So you don’t need to spend, I don’t know, $8,000 on a recorder machine and another $6,000 on microphones or things like that, but you can begin to record with your cell phone, and then you can plug in a microphone into your cell phone, and then if you like… you are enjoying the quality, or you want to really improve the quality, you can really jump to a Zoom recorder or a Tascam recorder, and then… and then… and then it’s like photography, you know, never ends. Photography, guitars, there’s no end. And nothing ends, you know. 

Rocío Florez is the Founder and CEO of Gocta Natura SAC and Gocta Natura Reserve. The reserve protects more than 200 acres in the Chachapoyas region of northern Peru—in the transition region between the Andes and the Amazon. For generations, the forest had been cut down to make way for cattle. Under Rocio’s leadership, the land is being rewilded to cloud-forest—habitat for birds, monkeys, and orchids. It is also the site of a lodge that allows guests to access the forest, one of the world’s tallest waterfalls, and the area’s ancient cultural sites.

Rocio holds a degree in Finance from California State University and a master’s degree in social management from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. She worked for 12 years at the World Bank, where she led the Peru chapter of a Hygiene Behavioral Change Research Program, while also providing support to initiatives across Latin America.

In 2009, she moved to the Amazonas region of Peru and established a sustainable development project in Cocachimba, in partnership with local communities, the private sector, and the National University Toribio Rodríguez de Mendoza of Chachapoyas. The initiative combined community capacity building, including the Children’s Forest Rangers program developed with the University, rewilding and reforestation, communication for change, and women’s leadership and economic empowerment. Over time, these efforts evolved into a rewilding hospitality model that integrates conservation, community development, and meaningful guest experiences.

Today, Gocta Natura is a certified B Corp and a signatory of the UN Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs).

Find the transcript below

Today we’re talking about your lodge, Gocta Reserva, in the north of Peru. You found this property with your husband on a birthday trip.

Exactly. We had not been in that area ever, so we decided to go and learn about the archaeological sites of that area in Peru, visit all the archaeological sites and wander around. We took a 7-day trip, it was a nice amount of days to visit almost everything. And we saved not knowingly, but knowingly I guess, the best for the last.

Gocta and Cocachimba are famous for their waterfall. Some people say this is the highest waterfall in the world. I don’t know what your thoughts are.

Well, they say the third tallest, but still, there are discussions about that as well. So we decided to go because someone told us about the waterfall. It was not in our map and we entered the area, where you have to go back through the same road. So you go in and the final part is the town of Cocachimba. From there the view is amazing because there are all these cliffs surrounding the small town and the area. 

We entered just after the rain had stopped and the sun came out. When it rains a lot of water, all the cliffs have waterfalls in different sizes, but Gocta is the main one in size. We really were astonished with the beauty of the place from the very beginning.

That’s great. Now, I think when most North Americans think of Peru, they have a picture of the Andes, which probably includes something like Machu Picchu. And Machu Picchu is in a transition zone between the high Andes and the Amazon. Gocta and Cocachimba are also in sort of an Amazon high Andean location, but you’re a cloud forest location.

Yes, exactly. We are in the lower part of the Andes, the newest part of the Andes. Landscape, by the way, is one of the attractions as well because it’s just beautiful. Wherever you go, whether to an archaeological site or when trekking, you will encounter these amazing views at some point. It is the Amazonian basin as you were saying, but it is high and it is cloud forest as well.

And when we think of cloud forest, we think especially of birds.

Yes, we have beautiful birds, some of them really in danger of extinction like the spatula tails hummingbird, but we have a wide variety of birds. And we learned about that as the time went by. 

For the past five or six years, I’ve had ornithologists come once a year to do an inventory to see how we were doing. So right now, in the property, we have over 180 varieties. And in time, we’ve learnt to plant for them. The spatula tail needs one type of flower, and the Tanagers need another type of tree, and so on. 

Rocío when you found this land it wasn’t what it should be. It wasn’t the native jungle, the cloud forest. It had been cleared for cattle.

Yes, cattle and agriculture. But I understood that as soon as I met the community and families. From the beginning, I would visit frequently, ever since we bought our first piece of land while returning from our first trek to Gocta. We would get to know about the families there and so that’s how we started for instance understanding why they cut trees. It is just a family economic matter. They plant beans or coffee for subsistence. 

But what happened in the meantime, was that tourism started coming. In most instances, they have left their land alone to grow, because they’re fully engaged as a community in tourism. There are well-trained guides locally. They are those who take the tourists on horseback all the way, especially back from the waterfall. Small hotels have arrived and restaurants as well, but very mildly. So, it still is a very nice little town. And so tourism in a way has replaced and has become a source of income for the families.

Well, it goes beyond the guiding and the hospitality. It goes to the food, it goes to the transportation. And in many cases when this happens, we’re also seeing a reduction in poaching. And people who maybe formerly made their lives as hunters become some of the best wildlife guides.

Yeah, that has been the transition which we’ve experienced. We got there 17 years ago and the waterfall had been discovered to the world in 2006. As it was only 3 years after that, we’ve seen the growth of tourism and specialized tourism as you were saying, the bird watchers and people from different parts of the world and also from Peruvians. 

You have no background in hospitality and it wasn’t your intention to open a hotel. This was a home you built and then you added a cabin for friends and now that’s evolved into six cabins and you’ve generously decided to share this place with the rest of the world.

It happened slowly, very slowly because as you say, I didn’t have any background in hospitality. The first years, we would stay in town with the families, so we got to know the families and the families got to know us. Then we decided to build a home, as you were saying. but a large home. 

The main area of the home was a very large living room with a kitchenette and our room, and then one additional cabin. My daughter is an architect so it was really great that she had to design it.

And then along with the main area, we built one cabin and we had people that know, friends of ours from Lima come and stay there for a while. It became obvious that we needed more space and we built two more. 

At that time, I was cautiously thinking about hospitality, but not really. I was engaged in projects that we would do with the community like the program to build young kids into the value of their place and the value of the environment and the forest. 

I was reluctant. I wasn’t sure if I was going to enjoy being a host or receiving people. So, we opened up in a very private way. The gate was closed and reservations had to be made in advance. So, we started receiving people and they would come to a home and they would eat like you eat at home and they had a wonderful time and so that started growing.

I want to circle back to two things you’ve said. One is that you bought the land the day you saw it.

Yes. We bought the first piece of land when we were coming back from the waterfall. My husband asked the guide, “Do you know if anyone is selling a piece of land?” And I just froze because I thought this is it, this is it because I love this place. I didn’t even turn around because I didn’t want to ruin the magic. So, yes, we left the place committed to paying for that piece of land. We had thought about retiring, so it made sense. And we had always thought about going to the country and doing something there, but we didn’t know what at all. And so, yes, it was from the beginning. And then what followed was that I would come back and then they would show us another piece of land. And the reserve now is made up of different pieces of land that we started buying and we have 84 hectares. 

The second point I wanted to emphasize is that before you built a hotel, you worked for many years with the local community with children to reforest the land.

Yes. First of all, we did a public private partnership with a firm that was willing to fund half of a program that was very successful in the south of Peru. And we brought the person that is the director and founder of that program to Cocachimba to share what they’ve done in the south with the families in Cocachimba. 

And so they accepted to work on it. It lasted about two years and it targeted the point of improving the economy in the family. So they would learn to save the water to have gardens, vegetable gardens, with drip irrigation or covered and they would learn about nutrition as well and many other sustainable technologies. 

That lasted two years. And it was really beautiful because someone who had the experience of the project in the south would come and live with everyone for three months and work with them on this concept. So that was beautiful. 

The other one was that I started a program that was called forest rangers of Balera which is the district. I invited kids from 8 to 14 years and during four years we worked on that beautiful program. I enjoy it so much. I had volunteers coming from Finland and they would work with the kids once a week. We would meet and we would do expeditions and we would visit the main university in Chachapoyas, which is the capital, and we would have you know sessions at the lab or we would visit the barn that they have there. Very high-tech university in Chachapoyas. So it was really fun and that lasted for years and those children are now grown-ups. They have worked with us at times and they’re going to university in different places like Chachapoyas or the city of Tarapoto or the city of Chiclayo and they’re learning different things: architects, one lawyer, communications and they come during their break and some of them work with us. And that’s so rewarding to see them grown and coming back. Beautiful.

Rather than moving to the big city in the hope of finding. So the families are kept intact, the generations and they’re reinvesting in the community.

Exactly. They come back and they do for instance a website for the local association of tourism. They do the web page or they build houses. So that’s really beautiful. So yes, I engaged in those two mainly the first years until 2014 when our main house was ready.

So the lodge designed by your daughter, the food designed by your son Matias.

Isn’t that beautiful? Yes. So my daughter, you know, she designed the cabins and the main house. And then she decided to stop her career and that was the last thing she did. That was so beautiful. She’s now a very well-known watercolor artist and conducting this program of well-being through watercolors.

And Matias came from his first trip in Australia and got connected with Gocta Natura and the people and the community and the kitchen, of course. So it started changing. It started widening in the sense that we started learning together about the people that grow in different areas of the Utcubamba Valley. And so we would go and meet the women of Kuelap, this locality, where they grow their own tubers and potatoes and peppers, their own way following the cycles of the moon. We learned about them and we started buying because their product was not beautiful but it was wonderful. You know it didn’t get to the markets. It didn’t have a demand but it started having a demand in time because of the story because of the care. We started growing in that sense and so Matias started designing every dish. Every food had an inspiration in an area that we had visited, in the produce that we had bought and we became connected with the area as such from the start of the Utcubamba River to almost when it flows into the Marañón and into the Amazonas. So it widened our scope of view and understanding and love for the place.

And Matias he’s been working with Virgilio and Pía.

Yeah, I think it was his first job when he came from his training stay in Australia and he worked for a year or so. And then he went off to do a small business of catering and then very soon afterwards he opened up his first coffee place, it was a small restaurant in Barranco and he started creating right there. It was different what he offered. It was a different food. It was creative in the dish, in the textures and in the taste of course. And then this restaurant became a chain. Now they have I believe three in other places. Mó bistro or Mó cafe. 

And how many people from the local community are you employing today?

Today I’m employing 11 people from the community and three more from Lima or Tarapoto as well. The chef is from Tarapoto. And what we do is, when we have a full house, we have several people come. We work with women a lot. And if they have a family and younger kids, it is great for them to have a way of generating income for a few days. Like they stay one week or 10 days. We do that in the maintenance of the garden, the vegetable garden and the forest.

A full house for you is..

20 is the fullest. Nice for me is 16.

So you have six cabins. Those are designed for two adults, but the day beds are perfect for a child.

Yes, it’s perfect for a child. And then we have the last one, number six. It has a mezzanine with two beds and an additional can enter as well.

So beyond the waterfall and the cloud forest and the birds and the coffee and the food, people come to this region for the ancient culture, you have several sites famous for their mummies and sarcophagi and you have the cloud forest city of Kuelap.

We enjoy doing the itineraries as well. We offer our guests the full package and we try to manage the distances so that it isn’t too long in one day. And yes, it is just gorgeous. It’s just amazing because you mentioned the sarcophagi or the mausoleums that are in the cliffs. So what I was saying before, you get to see them, but also see the landscape and where they worked and how they placed their sarcophagi in the cliff overlooking the sunrise, overlooking these landscapes is really beautiful. It’s really a magical moment. 

I have groups that go to visit one site in particular that is called El Tigre and it has several different sarcophagi in one cave. It’s quite high and I have people get really emotional after seeing them standing there overlooking the sunrise. It is beautiful. 

And then of course Kuelap is the best known and is the main citadel, multi-purpose citadel is well kept. It’s been restored wisely and so it’s really beautiful to go. But there are many other citadels that you can see at the top of other mountains. 

You can connect the visit a town, visit a citadel in other sites or visit Kuelap and there are more archaeology sites surrounding Kuelap. It is really an experience for the guests to get here and normally you don’t encounter people as well or as many people. If you visit July, you’re going to see a lot of people, but if you come in February, it’s the best, very quiet, and you can take your time. If you have a good guide, it’s really important because the information that they can give is really, really interesting. 

Logistics: you’re 50 minutes north of the Chucho airport, which is the main flight connection to Lima.

Exactly. We have daily flights to Chachapoyas in the morning and yes, it’s only 50 minutes in  quite good highway. So, you will reach our place very soon. And since it comes in the morning, you can also do some visits that day as well before coming to us, like walking through the city that is really beautiful, or visit the canyon surrounding the airport and then come you know in the afternoon maybe eat lunch in Chachapoyas as well and come to us.

Kuelap is a full day. It’s about 2 hours two and a half to the south.

Yes, it is a full day. So you visit that and you can stop in the way to see certain sarcophagi or hieroglyphs in the way to Kuelap. If you live very early to Kuelap, you can do something else, one more thing, like eat lunch by the river across from Kuelap and visit other ruins as well. 

Do you take people to Leimebamba?

I’ve done that. At the beginning it would be early in the morning to Leimebamba and then coming back to go to Kuelap which is really a lot, but some years ago I started doing that they would stay one night. So the itinerary would include a night or two if they wanted to in Leimebamba because there’s beautiful sites to visit in that area as well and then go to the museum. And then the next day visit ruins on your way back. Now we’re avoiding it because the highway from Tingo, where Kuelap is, to Leimebamba is not in good shape. Supposedly they’re going to start building a new one or repairing it thoroughly. We hope. And then we’re going to go back to Leimebamba because it is just beautiful as well and it has a lot to offer. So

One day I’m going from your hotel to Leimebamba. And then I’m continuing to Cajamarca.

Perfect. Yes. The road is not very good, but people do it. And there are, you know, people going that way as well. And they say the scenery is just beautiful. I haven’t done it. You can also head to the Laguna Los Condor from Leimebamba. Very beautiful, but a little bit of a hard trail with very expert guides and horses and stuff. So, it’s a whole adventure.

Horseback riding is one of the most special ways to encounter this landscape.

Yes, we don’t have many horses for unaccompanied riding yet, but we have local guides with horses who can accompany you for long distances. At every destination, you will find horses to get to where you are going. At Gocta Natura, hopefully this year or next, we are going to have this, since we have plenty of space for wandering and are building a road into a previously unvisited area. We are going to have a mulas just riding in an open dirt road with trees from one place to the other.

Although you may not have been trained in hospitality, you clearly have a natural gift for it. What is hospitality to you?

Hospitality, it’s a warm, attentive, informed way of receiving a guest for us. 

Reaching out before he or she comes, getting to know their interests or the special tastes or restrictions or their preferences in general before they get there. So there is a familiarity when they arrive.

It is about sharing what you care about the most, what we have built. The passion and care and love placed in each detail, because it makes for a wholesome stay. It connects with well-being, feeling well, forgetting what happened before or your thoughts and getting into this place that surprises you. Even though we send pictures and we say it’s a reserve -we don’t say it’s a hotel- there is an element of surprise when our guests get there. Because they arrive and are driven into a forest and then they are walked by one of us to their cabins. And as soon as they get to the cabin, they understand that it is private, that you can sit at the desk and rest, that you have freshly brewed coffee or tea or an apple to eat while you’re sitting on your deck and they are surprised by that. They normally smile. They normally tell you something, that’s really so beautiful for us. 

And then the food that we serve is placed in the dish with care. It has been conceived with care. Hospitality is about our guests sitting at the end of the day in the living room with a chimney on, or just sitting by the pool or just walking through our botanical garden through our trails in the forest and coming back thrilled and sitting at the table. A beautiful set table with produce and decorations, but nice and warm all along and having a wonderful meal. 

But we started doing the itineraries because we thought -or we learned- that our guests would go in cars or with guys with a different treatment on a day itinerary, on a full day, and come back tired and with a different mood. We started designing the itineraries making sure that they would get our hospitality model inside the car and all along the trail and visit and stuff. So if they wanted to have a coffee, they would have it, or a fruit in the way, they would eat it. And then our guides started learning about Gocta mode.

So what I’m hearing you say is that you’re sharing your special dream, that you’re presenting it with love and attention and warmth, that you’re really welcoming people into this world. You know, when a baby is born, they receive a few things. Eye contact, warmth, and human connection, and something to eat.

Exactly. That’s what we do. And when I say we, I really mean my team. The team is just wonderful. And when a new one comes, that knowledge or that way of doing things, it flows. So we are all happy doing what we do and providing just enough, I would say, quality for them to feel comfortable. Because too much is not as pleasant as just doing it with care and style but just enough. There are sitting places on different roads so that people can sit and be.

The concept I’ve been thinking about lately is transformation. Given the limited time that we have with our travelers, how do we affect transformation? I know this is something you’ve been thinking about. Some of the things that we’ve talked about, natural beauty, the awe of a waterfall or of an ancient culture, the wonder of birds and being in a cloud forest, and the connection with your staff. All of those things create the opportunity for meaning and deeper connection with those that they’re traveling with.

Yes, totally. The time competes with that because it is best when you have a free afternoon to just be. And it is common for our guests to change their itineraries and say, “No, tomorrow I don’t want to do anything. I just want to stay here.” 

And since we do a special itinerary visit to the waterfall, there are certain ways. You can leave at 5:15 a.m. with your breakfast on the horse and a guide, and go to see the Andean Cock-of-the-Rock (Peru’s national bird). We do that. It’s just magic to get there and see them early in the morning in their sessions of getting ready for the rest of the day. These huge birds, the female and the flirting with the male and the young ones and everything. You can see 15 of them in these canopies in the forest. So you can spend time with those noisy encounters. So that is an experience that ends eating breakfast by the waterfall and then they come back early. That is a wonderful day to just stay in Gocta and do a small walk or have a massage or just read. You leave with that little piece of transformation which means just enjoying yourself in nature for a while.

Rocío, just talking with you is calming.

Oh, thank you so much. I love what I do. I love what I do so much. And now you know what I can tell you now is that I’m planning to start again the forest rangers of Valera program with the new generations, most of them kids from our own people in school. I’m preparing a project to be funded that has to do with the reforestation of a specific endemic palm tree that is called Ceroxylon Peruvianum. We’re planning to in partnership with other institutions to reproduce these trees genetically and to expand the forest with them inside. We have like 36 in our forest and they’ve been studied. They have a lot of specialties and they’re beautiful and we’re looking for funding to do that to do 40 hectares of forest and we have sometimes the kids from school come over and do something like plant trees or do games in the forest. I’m planning to do a remake of the Guardabosques program linked to the new forest. The program has been accepted. Now I have to really work on the design. It is really what keeps me going. It’s really my soul, something I’ve learnt, how it has transformed me.

Nicolas Sahli is one of the founders of The Singular Hotels. With his father, Felipe, they have created two of Chile’s standout properties: The Singular Santiago and The Singular Patagonia. 

“Growing up between the Andes and the Pacific, I learned early that this country has a rare gift: landscapes so extreme and so beautiful that they demand your full attention. From the silence of Patagonia to the golden light of the desert, Chile has a way of making you feel genuinely alive.”

That sense of wonder is what drives Nicolas in his work. Chile deserves to be experienced slowly, with curiosity and intention—on a boat threading through the fjords, on horseback through the desert, or hiking in the wild heart of Patagonia. 

“My hope is that every guest who walks through our doors leaves with a story that belongs entirely to them, shaped by a corner of this country.”

This is not just a professional belief—it is how his family lives. “My wife and I have made Chile our greatest shared adventure, exploring it endlessly with our five children. And every time, Chile finds new ways to surprise us.”

What I find most rewarding is seeing our guests depart not just rested, but genuinely moved—carrying with them a feeling that they have touched something real and extraordinary about Chile.

Lilo Gari puts it this way, “Patagonia has always been what makes me happy.”

Lilo was born in the Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. He’s been living in Bariloche for the past nine years. It’s a place where he spent every summer growing up. “That’s why I developed such a deep love for this place.”

With a corporate past and an outdoor present, Lilo now works as master adventure guide, and as an outdoor experience product developer. “I see my role as a hybrid between a commercial strategist and a field guide. During the low season, I focus on planning, developing new experiences, and training partner agencies. Then, in the high season, I’m fully dedicated—almost without pause—to ensuring our guests are happy and able to truly absorb the experience.

Through creativity and attention, he builds bridges between the sometimes-stressful lifestyles of the travelers he serves, and a more circadian, nature-driven way of living.

“What I love most about my work is earning the trust of our guests and creating a space where we can reach a certain level of depth and connection. The natural environment plays a key role in this—it encourages creativity, openness, and sometimes even a bit of courage, so that when guests return home, they do so as a better version of themselves—me included.”

Lilo believes there is something in Patagonia for everyone, and his intention is to truly pay attention to each guest—to help them find their own form of Patagonian joy.

Throughout the journey, Lilo stays constantly attentive and flexible. “While Patagonian weather can be unpredictable, nothing is quite as dynamic as our guests’ expectations.”

“I understand that guests entrust me with the most valuable thing they have: their time.”

Simon Heyes is an ace of Latin American travel—the final boss, the old gaffer.

Simon fell head over heels for Latin America back in the early 90’s. He’s been a guide throughout the Andes—from Colombia to Chile. Then, after working for leading specialist UK tour operators, he started Senderos in 2004.

The question Simon asks is: How can you love Latin America and not want to preserve it, conserve it, and help it regenerate? 

Simon argues that tourism is uniquely capable of doing just that. It is a powerful tool for Conservation, Community, Culture and sustainable Commerce. 

Senderos is a positive-impact focused, UK-based marketing, sales and PR firm.  Its clients are conservation-focused wildlife lodges, private estancias, boutique hotels and expedition vessels in Latin America. 

Simon has been involved with The Latin American Travel Association since 1996. His firm has been a proud affiliate of The Long Run since 2017, and founding members of The Conscious Travel Foundation. Senderos gained B Corp certification in early 2024—bravo Simon! Well done—joining Travel by B Corp soon after.

I’m chuffed to bring you this conversation with The Ledge himself, Simon Heyes of Senderos.

Find the transcript below

Simon Heyes, it’s great to hear your voice again.

Simon: John Montgomery of Salt Lake City, it’s fantastic to be here with you and hear your voice.

Park City. Now we’ve moved, changed things.

Simon: You have. You’re out in the rural Idaho now, aren’t you?

I have. My only neighbor is a bald eagle.

Simon: Wow. Amazing. I aspire to this. I’m still in Bristol, but I’ve just been in the wilds of Patagonia and every time I come back, I think I love Bristol, but I think, ah, I need a little bit more countryside, bit more nature.

Yeah. You and I were just in the same place. Cerro Guido. Well, isn’t that a lovely thing? Someone mentioned, not knowing that we knew each other, but probably suspecting that we did, that you had been down there as well. What, in October?

Simon: That would be Gonzalo. And yes.

Yeah. I mean, what a place that is.

Simon: It’s shockingly beautiful.

Yeah, it did blow me away. And I knew it was going to be good. I haven’t been down to Torres del Paine for a few years. I did actually visit Cerro Guido 10, 11, 12 years ago when it was in a different, sort of, in a different form. But…

Simon: Yeah, so the landscapes were familiar, but, you know, the hotel was all new.

Did see a huge amount of incredible landscapes and incredible wildlife, but an armadillo wasn’t on the list. So what else did you see when you were there that we can compare notes?

Simon: You know, the most unscripted moment, let’s call it, was when we were riding. We were really riding. And you know, there you can run. You can canter as fast as your horse can carry you and your wits will allow. We’re mounting this valley, and in the distance is that peak of Paine Grande that they sometimes call Bart Simpson because it has spiky hair and a straight-faced profile. Well, in the distance we see a black stallion, and he’s circling something, and he’s very agitated. He’s rearing up on his hindquarters and giving us the full cinematic, you know, front-leg cycle motion.

Incredible.

Simon: And we get closer and we realize he’s protecting another horse, a horse that—and these are wild horses, they’re not part of the ranch—this horse has had some sort of an injury or an illness, and it’s lying down, and it’s on its last breaths, and it’s giving us this wild-eyed stare. But this beautiful black stallion just keeps circling and doesn’t want us to approach. And of course the gauchos want to get closer to find out, take some photos, go back and talk to the vet, see if there’s anything that can be done.

And the stallion gives us some space to do that. And he—I think he senses that we’re not so much of a threat, but he’s pacing along sort of the mesa top nearby. And we do our little check and leave them in peace all the time, wishing we could do something for this horse. And as we’re going away, he does another one of those hind leg rear-ups, you know, straight off the silver screen, and gives us the whinny and then comes back down and starts protecting her again.

There is an extraordinary drama to Patagonia, isn’t there? And a real drama to Cerro Guido. I think everyone who goes there—nobody will have that same moment again. That’s yours. That won’t ever be produced. But there is something where you enter some kind of flow of natural splendor. Cerro Guido is a portal into a dramatic wild nature that very few of us get to see. And I think everyone who stays there has these moments. No one’s going to have the moment you had, but everyone’s going to have something.

I’d just come—it was a very unusual visit because I’d just come from doing a huge amount of walking in El Chaltén, Laguna de los Tres. Spent a lot of time with Alberto del Castillo from Estancia Cristina, with Mariana and Carla and him. And then I arrived at Cerro Guido, and my back decided to go into spasm. So I was in this extraordinary place—107,000 hectares, over a quarter of a million acres of wild Patagonia to explore, and I could barely get to my room. But I did manage to get moving again.

And actually there’s always something you can get from every moment, isn’t there? And the fact that I wasn’t out horse riding with Victor as much as I wanted to be meant that I sat down with Victor in the stables and interviewed him, and I sat down with Claudia, the amazing chef, in his kitchen. And I chatted to a lot of people. And then I did have my moment: the next morning I managed to get my back moving and went out on the conservation safari with Pía and Sebastian and Mariana, and we spent the whole morning around the Condorera, you know, the condor cliffs that you would have visited.

It was very Patagonian: stormy, dark skies, kind of light rain. And we weren’t focusing on the keystone species; we were just focusing on the incredible views and the drama and the wind and just being outside in this amazing place. And as we headed up to the Condorera, we saw some falcons and two falcon chicks which had been in a nest the week before and were now trying to learn how to fly, with the parents keeping an eye on them. Amazing, kind of watching these falcons trying to fly in the gusts of Patagonia. And then we saw a fox, and it was just beautiful. But we were about to head back when Pía said, ‘Simon, you should come and see my living room, my living room,’ she told me. And I was like, because she knew my back was sore and she thought, ‘This old boy needs to go back and have a cup of tea,’ but ‘I’ll show him my living room first.’ And we moved over to the cliffs, the condor cliffs, and there was a condor up there, and we were looking at the condor, and then suddenly she said, ‘Puma.’

And she said it from her—she said it from her midriff, from her stomach—’ Puma.’ And she told me that she follows her gut instinct, and down there, probably only 20 or 25 meters, were these piercing eyes, and it was extraordinary. I’ve never seen a puma before. I’ve been very lucky with wildlife sightings all over Latin America, but…

Panthers.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, just missed the black panther. But it was…

Really a panther, right? It’s a jaguar, too. But the puma—Panthera. Panthera is the Latin, right? So, you’re absolutely spot on.

But yeah, we were—moving away from Patagonia, we were at Trijun in the Cerrado in Brazil in April, and we were there at the same time as a National Geographic journalist whom we’d organized to visit with my wife and my kids. And the journalist, she went out, and she saw a maned wolf and a black jaguar that afternoon. And we didn’t. So, you just never know with wildlife sightings, do you? They’re always different and never to be repeated.

I want to make sure all the Americans listening know that he said maned wolf. A wolf with a mane, not a maimed wolf.

Yes, quite right. Sorry. Yes, quite right, John. Thank you for pointing that out. Yeah, maned wolf, which is an extraordinary creature out on a limb in evolutionary terms. It’s neither a wolf nor a fox; it looks a little bit like both. And Stanley Stewart called the maned wolf the ballerina of the Cerrado, of the savannah, which is Brazil’s greatest, great savannah and most biodiverse savannah on the planet. And the maned wolf is the closest—it’s a wild dog, but it’s an extraordinary creature and a keystone species and emblematic of biome health. And as we know, all interconnected with all of the other creatures in the biome. So yeah, very important.

Same vibe as a wild dog in Africa but longer legs.

Yeah, exactly. Very, and sort of delicate-looking. I mean, there’s a sort of—you feel a connection with them, and they feel fragile as well, and you sort of feel protective about them.

How did you get started in all this? I know you were a guide in Venezuela and you were a guide in Peru, but where did that come from?

So, I think calling me a guide in Venezuela is probably overstating it. And I was—I did work as a guide for a short time in Venezuela in ’94. And let’s just say I probably didn’t cover myself in glory as a guide. I was a bilingual trekking guide in the Andes and didn’t have a great grasp of Spanish and didn’t know the mountains that well. So, it was a fairly inauspicious start to working in tourism, but I learned fast, and I fell head over heels in love with Venezuela, and then Chile, and then Peru, and then Ecuador on that first sort of 18 months of traveling and working and traveling around South America after university.

But why? What is it? How do we put our finger on why Latin America? I’m asked this all the time.

Yeah, it’s a really interesting question, isn’t it? I mean, I think part of it is where I come from. You know, I come from a very crowded island. We’ve got 60 million people in a fairly small space. And particularly when you’re in your early 20s and hoping for adventure, it is totally intoxicating to arrive at these landscapes and these mountains and this wildlife and these people as well. I mean, I think, you know, you travel and you engage in humanity and the basic hospitality of incredible people. So I think the people of Latin America just have always impressed me so deeply and been so hospitable to me. And then these landscapes, and little crowded England—it’s like another planet, isn’t it?

Yes. And so much diversity within one continent.

Simon: Yeah. So much. I mean, you know, I think about the places we work with. We were South America only for many years, probably 15 years. And then we were very much South America because that’s where I’d spent all my time and that’s where I’d then worked as a tour operator. So I set up Senderos in 2004, so 21 years ago. And it was—maybe I didn’t exactly understand what I loved, but I’d learned at my previous job at Last Frontiers that I was very drawn to people working in remote places. And I don’t think anybody knew the word sustainable back then, but these fascinating characters were doing something very interesting. They were very often working on farms—estancias, fazendas, haciendas—and giving people another word that we probably didn’t use back then: ‘authentic.’ So what does authentic mean? Well, a working farm, real people, protecting these special places and people and these biomes. So, we started working in 2004. Yeah. And we’ve just worked with the most incredible people and places across Latin America, and these days it’s Costa Rica and South America.

And you’re touching on what I think of as the mission for Senderos—and please add—but it’s conservation, community, and culture.

Simon: Yeah, that’s right. Those, I think, those have always been our passions, but we’re much more aware of them now. They’ve become a very conscious mission for us. Tourism—we believe that tourism can be an incredible force for good. And actually, at the leading edge of protecting biomes and biodiversity, Senderos—yes, that’s right—we believe that tourism can be this commercial piece in protecting wildlife and protecting unique cultures and communities. So that’s really what we look for, and we do particularly work in large-scale biodiversity protection. And you can imagine—this is something we’ve done since the beginning, actually, in Peru with Tambopata Research Center—you can imagine this is the very stuff that people require from their holidays. So there’s not a conflict; there’s not a sort of, ‘oh, should I be sustainable or can I have a great holiday?’ If you want a great holiday, better trips are naturally protecting the very resources we require in order to have these great holidays. So, we need keystone species like condors. We need keystone species like maned wolves and jaguars and pumas, all these wonderful animals. And the people that protect them are our root in those landscapes and those biomes. Does that make sense? I’m not sure it does.

I feel it, and I think it’s true that tourism, small-scale sustainable tourism, when done right, is a very powerful tool for protecting cultures, protecting landscape, protecting habitat, and wildlife.

Simon: Yeah. I mean, there’s a bit of jeopardy here, isn’t there? You know, there is jeopardy. We know that there’s huge positive elements to this, but the jeopardy is also that we know that around the world, including Latin America, we’re losing biodiversity and we’re losing biomes and we’re losing space. So what sort of industries, what sort of solutions can we have to that? And actually, tourism is absolutely one of the solutions for that because we need to protect in order to also enjoy. And this has all been brought into clarity for me over the last 10, 15 years working with our friends at the Long Run, working with our friends at the Conscious Travel Foundation, and also in the last few years with B Corp—we became a proud B Corp in 2024, and I’d been looking at that as a potential pathway for us for many years before that. And all of these networks inspire me and re-energize me with this belief that tourism is this incredible force for good.

So, we should explain too that Senderos is a company that represents different properties across Latin America, primarily to the UK and European market.

Simon: That’s very good, John. I think you are one of the few people who understands what we do. I have friends who I’ve known for 35, 40 years who say, ‘Simon’s a travel agent.’ No, I’m not. But no, that’s right. We represent—and another way of saying it, I think a sort of poetic way, is that we try and take a little part of the soul of these incredible places and bring them over here and communicate their stories. So we’re marketing and PR, we’re B2B, and we work with a portfolio of small hotels, very large conservation projects where tourism is a piece, and we represent them and we promote them to tour operators and press, yes, in the UK mostly and also in German-speaking markets in mainland Europe.

And when I think of the roughly 30 properties that you represent these days, maybe 20 of them are private reserves or other types of conservation areas where the hotel is a small piece of what’s happening there, but it funds a lot of the conservation. It’s similar to the model that you’ll find on concessions in places like Botswana.

Simon: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think they are often very large, not all, but often very large pieces of biodiverse land where the owners are trying to find a solution to how to make this commercially sustainable. So, they’re all different. They’re utterly different. But for example, in the Pantanal in Brazil, Roberto Klabin, who’s the owner of Caiman, which is a pioneering eco-lodge and ranch in the Pantanal—you know, the Pantanal is 95% privately owned. So what’s the solution, the conservation solution in the Pantanal? It has to be one that also uses this word that I was talking about a lot in Patagonia a few weeks ago: coexistence. Coexistence with human activities. So we need to find a path that allows for keystone species and biodiversity and human activities. It has to be sustainable, and that’s where the community part comes in, isn’t it, very strongly.

Simon: So Caiman is one of the most reliable locations on the planet for viewing jaguar, but also they have a hyacinth macaw project there, and all of this land and all of the animals that live there—it’s a former cattle ranch, there is still some cattle ranching going on, but as with Cerro Guido and their sheep, they found a way to coexist.

Yeah. I think part of the project that I’m involved in, you are involved in, and everyone else involved in is inevitably we have to put a value on nature. I mean, unfortunately, we shouldn’t have to, but I think the world we live in, we do. And part of this grand project that we’re involved in is putting a value on the life of a jaguar, the life of a maned wolf, a condor, a fox, and we’re at the very early stages of this. But these ranches and these lodges and these huge conservation areas, that is what they’re doing. What they’re saying in the Pantanal is that the value of a live jaguar for tourism is many, many times the cost of an occasional cattle or cow that might be attacked by jaguars. And that is actually very similar to what they’re doing in Cerro Guido with the Fundación and the Puma project, which is they’re developing a model which can be rolled out to many, many different private and national park protected areas.

Simon: Uh, I’ve used their Foxlights system on my chicken coop and it’s working well.

Fantastic. Yeah, it’s, I mean, it’s so inspiring, isn’t it? There are so many kind of tough-to-hear stories in the media, and it’s so inspiring to spend time with people who are not denying that, they’re just putting it aside and they’re saying, ‘Right, what can I do?’ And they are doing these incredible, life-changing, biome-changing projects working in coexistence. And that, I mean actually, that is a brilliant metaphor for what tourism can be: coexistence. We need these amazing experiences. If that sounds selfish, doesn’t it? We need them. But actually, we travel to these places, we are changed by these places, we are bringing our money to these places, but also this is reciprocity in action. We return changed and we return to our little nature-depleted country that is the United Kingdom, which is apparently about 185th on the most nature-depleted countries on earth, and we look around and we go, ‘Can we do things differently here? What can we do differently here?’ So there is reciprocity, and I think there’s honor in that—you’re bringing money, you’re bringing stories, you’re bringing opinion, you’re bringing the power of your advocacy, but you’re returning home changed.

These are enriching experiences.

Simon: Very much so, very much so, yeah. I don’t think it’s too dramatic to say life-changing transformation, transformational. Absolutely. And the power of that positive experience, the power of learning, of having your children learning, of their eyes being opened and their brains just completely astounded by something that they’ve never seen before—I mean, traveling as a family in Latin America, you know as well as I do, is just the most fantastic experience.

It’s a passport to people’s hearts. If you’re walking around, you know, as a couple, okay, hello. But if you’re walking around with a child, oh well, let’s throw open the doors. ‘How about some wine? Please have dinner with us. Can we hold your baby during dinner?’ You know, Latin countries value children in a way that’s rare.

Simon: Yeah, they do. They don’t see them as an impediment. They see them as a blessing. Absolutely, a blessing. And I always remember we used to go when our children were babies. We’d be in Rio—my wife’s from Rio, and we spend a lot of time in Rio—and we’d walk into a shop and the ladies in the shops would take our babies off us so that we could look around the shop. They just love children in Latin America, don’t they? And then you take them to these extraordinary places, and actually Cerro Guido is incredibly child-friendly and it’s an amazing landscape for children to learn and have their minds enriched. And a lot of the places that we work with are like that. I’m thinking about Costa Rica, Tortuga…

We’ve taken our kids when they were babies to Lapa Rios.

Simon: That’s right. Have you been to Tortuga Lodge in Tortuguero on the Caribbean side?

Yes, with the kids. And that is what Walt Disney wanted to do when he made the Jungle Cruise, you know, but it’s real.

Simon: And so there’s toucans and spider monkeys and howlers and sea turtles, and you’re in these boats going through canals and it’s…

All of that.

Simon: Magical for children because it’s right there.

And these electric morphos, you know, flapping their wings around you, and oropendolas making that bizarre bell call. It’s…

Simon: Yeah, that’s right. And I remember Pygmy Kingfisher, and we know there are manatees in the river, and the fact that they’re very…

I’ve seen them coming back to see…

Simon: Well, you see, I haven’t there, but I was going to say the fact that you don’t necessarily see everything doesn’t matter, does it? Because you’re caught in this timeless wonder in these places, and none of the kids are asking for Netflix or TV or their phones. They are utterly caught up in the wonderment of it.

Dad, can we go out on the night tour? Dad, can we wake up tomorrow and go do this again?

Simon: Yeah, absolutely. I haven’t yet taken my kids to the Galapagos, but I know that when they do, that will also completely blow their minds and educate them. And all of these experiences are just moving us out of our daily habits and showing us possibility and wonderment of the natural world.

Galapagos is so special for us and our family. Some people have Hawaii or Mexico here in the US, but for us it’s Galapagos.

Simon: Yeah, yeah. I know you spent a lot of time down there. Mostly on islands rather than on the liveaboards, on the yachts, you know.

I think the eastern and southern itinerary is ideal for young kids. As our kids are aging, it’s making more sense to do the western and northern routes, but we love the land-based options on Santa Cruz and have terrific friends there. In fact, our daughter in her gap year, our second daughter, she worked in the highlands on an organic farm there. So, yeah, it’s very special.

Simon: I agree it’s very special. And I’ve spent a lot of time sort of on the islands and hopping between the islands, but I think, you know, it’s very exciting getting over to the—I mean, I think any itinerary in the Galapagos people are going to just love, but for me when you get over to Fernandina and the west…

Yeah, that’s very exciting.

Simon: I think partly maybe I’m getting a bit antisocial in my old age, John. We were talking about this. I live in a small city; I live in Bristol, but I travel to these very remote places.

Home of Portishead and Wallace and Gromit. Incredible.

Simon: And Massive Attack.

Massive Attack, how can I forget?

Simon: Yeah, Wallace and Gromit obviously would be the major attraction for you. But yeah, I live in this city, but I travel to these remote places, and I think that is also an interesting phenomenon. We know that overtourism is happening in many, many places, and that people might not be talking about it yet on social media, but we know it’s impacting their experience. And so picking where you travel away from the crowds and maybe at the times of year which are slightly unusual is all part of why great tour operators like yourself, like Landed, do their job: finding the right time of year, finding the right place, and delivering those experiences.

You look at images, wide shots of people in Santorini or at the Louvre. It’s depressing. And the term that people have mentioned more often this year than any other time is solitude. Yes, it’s nice to go to the gateway cities, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Lima—great food, great museums, amazing culture—but then you want to get out into something deeper, wilder, purer that restores you.

Yeah. I think when a major phone brand is producing a phone whose most important selling point is that it can automatically take people out of your selfie, you know that there’s something happening in the wider world, and that is overtourism. And these places, these hotspots, these incredible places—if it doesn’t bother you to go there with lots and lots of other people, then fine. But it does bother me and I think it bothers actually everybody. You know, I think you can go to these great cities, and it’s just good to have a local expert who can tell you where to go, at what time, at the right place. I love San Jose, the capital city of Costa Rica, but when I go there, it’s where you arrive, and it’s the stepping stone into Costa Rican culture, and then you travel around the city. When I go there, I stay at our partner Finca Rosa Blanca, which is so close, so close.

It feels so apart from the hustle of the city.

Simon: It feels so apart. And it’s an oasis. It’s another of these truly regenerative places where bird song has returned, where coffee is produced—tree-shaded organic coffee. And again, you can drink your coffee, you can have your room, you can have your beautiful pool, but you can coexist with the natural biodiversity of that place.

Simon, you get around. What are some of your favorite memories, your favorite moments traveling either with your family or with guests?

Simon: Well, I tell you what, John. I think we should do a little recap of where me and you have met actually before I move on to my family. I was thinking about it today and it’s very hard to find dates stretching back into memory, but you can help me here now. We met in Lima on a bus.

Simon: Yeah. Now, was that in 2005 or 2010?

Yes, 2005.

Simon: I think it was 2005.

And your wife was with you?

Simon: My wife was with me—my new wife, because we had just got married.

Simon: Yeah, we just got married. We had a little short honeymoon, and then the slightly bigger honeymoon was a work-ymoon where we went out to Peru and the Galapagos. So, 2005. So I’ve known you coming up for 21 years.

Yes, sir.

Simon: And we’ve also met—well, you came with me to the Huaorani Eco Lodge, that extraordinary joint community project in Ecuador. And I think that was either 2007 or 2013.

And I remember we got stuck in Shell for a couple of days and ate this thing called trucha for three nights. The only other option was the chontacuros that they were trying to push on us.

Simon: You have a very good memory. That’s right.

Things stand out.

Simon: But waiting for the plane to take us in…

When we did get the weather window and we were able to fly out, Simon, it was such a gift. We flew out over this ocean of green, the Amazon basin. And you think, well, Ecuador, I mean, not much compared to Brazil, compared to Peru, compared to Colombia. No, this was endless. May it stay endless, but we’re flying endlessly over a sea of green. And then we sort of slowly descended onto this tiny little airstrip. And I remember the Huaorani coming out of the trees and putting on t-shirts so we’d feel comfortable.

Simon: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, I remember that flight and it was always a case of the wonder of the endless green and may it never stop, and then as you keep heading into the endless green, a little bit of anxiety because where exactly is it that we’re going to land?

I’ve seen this movie.

Simon: Yeah. Yeah. And meeting the Huaorani, so extraordinary of people who truly have a different, truly have a different grasp on reality to us. That wonderful book which I know you’ve read back in the day, Savages by Joe Kane, New York—it was a bestseller, wasn’t it? And he gave us many examples of how the Huaorani just think differently and interact differently with their environment. But Ecuador, yeah, it’s such a wonderful country. So small compared, you know, like Costa Rica really, these are very small countries, but yet so diverse and so easy to travel around and see incredible differences in a relatively short amount of time.

Yeah, we also have been to the Chilean fjords together.

Simon: We have. We have indeed. We were down there for remote Latin America, weren’t we? Which I think was 2017.

Sounds right.

Simon: And then you and I were housemates with Nicolas and with Petit Miribel in a beautiful home in Barra Grande right before the pandemic.

Special, special times.

Simon: Yeah, we were at this incredible show in Barra Grande, which is a fairly hard-to-get-to place. And then we had this just wonderful villa with sort of water flowing through it in fountains—not through the roof, I should add, but—and these amazing views, and just a very beautiful, peaceful, serene place. And then these great friends who, coincidentally, I think it was coincidental they put us together.

That experience helped me navigate the pandemic. I traveled there in my mind many times.

Simon: It set us up just before things turned pear-shaped in 2020.

Yeah. 2019 was a year of amazing journeys actually, and then we paused for 18 months or so, and then where else have we met? So then we met…

Cuenca recently.

Simon: I was going to say—I saw you, you and Erin, on a street in Cuenca, which was about two and a bit years ago.

Yes, sir. And you invited us in. We had some kind of pastry or something when you get your coffee.

Simon: Yeah, we’ve had all these lovely little meetings and we always say we’re going to meet next time in Salt Lake City or in Brazil or in Bristol. We never quite manage it, but I think that should be our New Year’s resolution.

You and I, Gocta Natura Reserve, Northern Peru, sometime in the next 12 months.

Simon: Yeah, John, you know, I was swimming this morning at my beloved lido. It was quite cold; it activated my brain. And as I was swimming, I was thinking, right, I think later this year, we need a trip to Gocta Natura Reserve in the north of Peru to see this amazing lodge owned by the beautiful Rocío—another B Corp Lodge they are. And then possibly some archaeoastronomy around the Sacred Valley, and then maybe, who knows, maybe Lake Titicaca, but certainly I think a little trip me and you this year would be very, very welcome. And permission from the ladies, you think?

Well, we—I won’t get a pass before I take my family to Brazil in April, but once that’s in the bank, we should be able to get a pass, I think. Yes. I mean, it’s work, right, John?

Simon: It’s work. We are researching. We do have to know the places before we can have a judgment. Well, Gocta—I mean, I was—I think I mentioned to you I have not been to Chachapoyas for a very long time. In fact, around the time I met you for the very first time, I was exploring the Cordillera Blanca and then up in Chachapoyas. So, other people in my team, Nicolas has been to Gocta, but I am due, I’m due a visit. So, it would be great if we could do that together.

Yes. And you have a home outside of Paraty. This is where you go in Brazil. And if I’m not wrong, certain people can have access to that home.

Simon: Yeah, right folks. Yeah, we love Paraty. I mean, my first client, Pousada Picinguaba back in 2004, took me to that area, to Paraty and the Costa Verde, and it just blew my mind. Mountains, forests, huge peninsulas with no roads. I mean, I just fell in love with Paraty and we work with a very beautiful hotel there called Pousada Literária, which is the sister hotel of Trijun in the Cerrado and Tutabel, where I was a few months ago in Trancoso, visiting those places, and the ever-incredible Ibitipoca project as well. But yeah, Paraty does have a special place in my heart, and once a year we make our little family pilgrimage to Rio and Paraty, and then we try and visit one of Senderos‘ clients. So I’m absolutely thrilled to be going back to Cristalino in the Amazon in April and taking four-fifths of my family with me. So yeah, looking forward to that. That’s going to be really, really exciting. They’ve got some great new things happening there as well. So I’ll be reporting back when I’m back in the UK after the Brazil trip in April.

Well, Simon, it’s a pleasure always. You’re one of the real ones, one of the greats.

Simon: Oh, you’re making me smile, John. We go back a long way, me and you, and we share a love of many of the same places and many of the same people. And it’s always so good to see you and so good to talk to you. And it’s a pleasure chatting to you today.

Next time in Peru, and then in Park City.

Simon: John, I’m sending you a big hug as always. From Bristol to you, Abrazo. Thanks, Simon.

Sebastián Correa Ehlers is Vice President of Explorations & Land Management at Explora. He leads exploration programs and expeditions across South America, and in emerging destinations such as Iceland. 

Trained as a philosopher, with early studies in architecture, and formative experience as a missionary in the Peruvian Andes, his work combines territorial insight, operational leadership, and place-based storytelling. He creates meaningful exploration experiences grounded in respect for landscape, nature, and culture.

Sebastian lives in Santiago with his family, and we caught up by phone.

“Humbleness is about understanding your scale in this universe. If you discover that, you will be in the right place in your own life. These places are the key for that because in dialy life in cities it’s difficult to understand who you are and what your scale is. You are part of something great but much bigger than yourself. And you are the key to it, but you must understand the size of it and your own size on it”.

Explora is a collection of lodges focused on immersive travel in some of South America’s most remote regions. Designed for comfort while keeping guests closely connected to the surrounding environment, each property sits within extraordinary landscapes. With a strong focus on sustainability and expertly guided excursions, Explora invites travelers to experience the region’s natural beauty and cultural depth in a meaningful way.

Born in the Cordillera Blanca region of central Peru, Ignacio Masias is a visionary hotelier, deeply rooted in the landscapes and cultures of the Andes.

His first major project was the early development of his family’s land in Aguas Calientes, where he helped shape what would become the Machu Picchu Pueblo Hotel. That early effort helped define a turning point in Peruvian tourism—elevating the standards for service and immersive experiences.

After studying business and hospitality in the United States and Europe, Ignacio returned to Peru with a clear mission: to reimagine travel through design-forward spaces, storytelling, authentic cultural connection, and environmental stewardship

Since then, “Nacho” has founded a collection of exceptional properties: Atemporal, a stylish urban retreat in Lima; CIRQA, a restored 16th-century monastery in Arequipa; Titilaka, a modern lodge atop a private peninsula on Lake Titicaca; and Puqio, a refined tented camp in the Colca Valley. Each reflects his commitment to understated luxury, cultural resonance, and sustainable travel.

We reunited during a trip to Guatemala, reflecting on his journey, lessons learned, and what’s on his horizon.

“I think creativity is about having no fear, or at least facing it, because many people are creative but they have a fear of being wrong. So when you overcome that fear of being wrong and you don’t care about being wrong and you learn from being wrong, you let loose your creativity and it grows every time you make a mistake.”

Did you know that, to escape the Napoleonic forces invading Portugal in 1807, the Portuguese court relocated from Lisbon to Brazil? They ruled the empire from Rio de Janeiro until Brazilian independence in 1822.

Although no longer in power, the Portuguese royal line continues. Several of its contemporary members are well known for their public service and activism.

That legacy is carried on by His Highness Prince João Henrique Maria Gabriel Gonzaga de Orléans Bragança, a scion of Brazil’s Imperial House. A grandson of Pedro de Alcântara, he belongs to the Petrópolis branch of the Orléans Braganza family.

Educated in photography and business, João Henrique is a photographer, with about a dozen books capturing the landscapes and people of Brazil, Polynesia, Southeast Asia, and Africa. We discussed one of these books, Olhar de Joao, which highlights his time with 1978 documentation of the Xingu culture of Brazil’s Amazon region.

A committed environmentalist, Joao has focused on rainforest preservation. He owns and operates a boutique hotel, Pousada do Principe, in Paraty. He views small-scale tourism as a realistic path to environmental and cultural preservation.

Joao lives in Rio, near the rocky Arpoadaor Peninsula—the division between Copacabana and Ipanema. He’s the father of a son and a daughter, Prince João Philippe and Princess Maria Cristina.

With his relaxed Carioca surfer vibe and strong ties to Brazil’s monarchical past, João Henrique is a man for every age. A royal spirit, he is distinctly attuned to contemporary Brazilian culture and sustainability.

Ghetto Huaman Serrano is a native of Cusco, and a natural as a guide. He’s been scrambling around the Peruvian Andes for decades, leading expeditions on through the Sacred Valley and along remote stretches of the Inca Trail.

Recently, I organized a “black diamond” hiking trip with some friends I’ve known for years—likeminded men who, like me, needed some time to think. We needed a pause from our full plates of adult responsibilities to process questions of fatherhood, marriage, faith, and our careers. That route took us from Cusco to Machu Picchu through sections of trail none of us had explored before.

For that special trip, Guido was our handpicked guide. Guido helped us dig deeper into a landscape and a culture that I thought I already knew. Along the way, he dexterously stepped us through history, geology, cosmology, botany, ecology, and ornithology.

He’s one of those rare guides who, producing a handmade flute from thin air, can pipe an impromptu folk song that actually improves the moment. He’s organized, good humored, prepared, experienced, and unflappable. Need drinking water on a section of trail without any? He’ll find a way.

Guido and I talked throughout our journey, and I’ve compiled some of those daily conservations here for you.

“(This trip) has meant a lot of things. I think maybe mostly, gratitude. Just thinking about what we are blessed with. I think we were blessed in many ways (…). I definitely feel gratitude for both this world that’s been created and the opportunity to learn of other cultures and share that with the world.”