
Tijuca National Park: The Fight to Rewild the World’s Largest Urban Forest
Rio de Janeiro, renowned for its beaches, football, and Carnival, is also home to a hidden gem – the world’s largest urban forest, the Tijuca forest. This forest is not just any ordinary woodland. Protected since 1861, even before the establishment of the first national park in the United States, the Tijuca National Park spans 40 sq km and is a part of the Atlantic Forest, which was once a vast biome stretching across 1,000,000 sq km of the Brazilian coastline. Unfortunately, only about 15% of the Atlantic Forest remains today, largely due to sugarcane and coffee plantations, as well as logging by European colonists dating back to the 16th Century.
















