The Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve

Honduras’s great rainforest, and it is on the danger list

It is on the danger list. UNESCO inscribed the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve in 1982 and then, in 2011, placed it on the List of World Heritage in Danger, where it remains a working example of how hard protection is to hold in practice.

What is being protected is 5,250 square kilometres on the Caribbean watershed of Honduras, in the Gracias a Dios department, running from mountains down to the coast. It holds some of the largest remaining fragments of tropical rainforest in Central America, both montane and lowland, and it forms part of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, the chain of protected ground that runs from Mexico south through the isthmus.

More than 2,000 people live inside it. UNESCO's description notes that these indigenous inhabitants have preserved their traditional way of life inside the reserve. The protection has to work around people who were there first and are still there.

Its first name is the interesting one. In 1960 the land was set aside as the Ciudad Blanca Archaeological Reserve, after the rumoured lost settlement of that name, and it was only renamed for the Rio Platano in 1980. A management plan drawn up that year was implemented in 1987, and a further 3,250 square kilometres of buffer zone was added in 1997.

What put it on the danger list is documented rather than suspected. The threats are illegal hunting, logging and clearing land for cattle, and rafting expeditions running the river from the headwaters through all three zones have recorded cattle grazing inside the core zone, commercial fishing and hunting camps along the river, and clear cutting near Las Marias.

The strangest thing about the place is how little is written down. Despite covering a substantial share of Honduras and being a World Heritage Site for over forty years, very little has been recorded about its biological diversity. Endangered species are known to be present without the inventory being anywhere near complete.

That combination, a reserve too remote to survey properly and too pressured to leave alone, is roughly why it went on the danger list.