was once covered by a tropical rainforest that biologists consider the richest in the Americas, the Mata Atlantica.

The emerald green setting of Rio de Janeiro is part of it.

Today over ninety percent is gone.

Many Brazilians now realize that the ten percent that remains is a national treasure.

People who live in it know that even better.

Funding for In the Americas David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

When Europeans arrived, the Mata Atlantica extended for over a thousand miles along the coast.

In the heart of the forest, they founded the city of Rio de Janeiro and a mountainous harbor in an incomparable setting.

Hidden within the teeming metropolis of Rio de Janeiro, below the towering peaks, is a very special place.

A million people a year come here to visit the Rio de Janeiro botanical gardens.

It's hard to believe we're in the middle of the city of Rio de Janeiro here, and yet we're in the Atlantic Forest.

Rogerio Gribel- This area was probably coffee plantations, sugar plantations, pastures 150 years ago and now we have a beautiful forest with a lot of life.

Dave- You actually have two different sectors of the park, the gardens which have plants from everywhere, and then the hillsides which are the original forests.

Rogerio- The Amazon probably would have around 16,000 different species of trees.

Dave- 16,000?

Rogerio- 16,000 yeah, and the Atlantic forest would probably have half of this.

The Atlantic forest is very important to Brazil because perhaps seventy percent of the Brazilian population lives in an area originally occupied by Atlantic forest.

All the rivers that you use to supply water for the big cities like San Paolo and Rio come from the Atlantic forest.

The area in the past was sugar cane and coffee plantations basically, and the combination of the reforestation with the national regeneration and leave the lands quiet without disturbance, we have now this fragile forest Floresta of the hills in the forest of the Tijuca.

These huge birds, Brazilians call them Jacus, and they're semi-tame because people feed them.

These are capuchin monkeys that now live in the Tijuca forest, they're a happy bunch.

They're moving around so fast it's hard to follow, up and down the trees, and they're chasing each other.

You know, they like to run and here's a chance at the base of the Tijuca forest.

They can come down and get here and run and play to their hearts content.

And chase each other.

Most of plants in the Atlantic forest and all tropical forests are dispersed by mammals or birds.

We have a law that protects the remaining patch of the Atlantic Forest, but they are mainly fragments, there is no gene flow between these fragments.

We had no movement of animals, no movement of pollen, no movement of seeds between these fragments.

So the connectivity of this area is strategic to preserve and conserve the natural process and the diversity as a whole.

In my view is that it is very important for people around the world know that in this part of the planet that we call Atlantic coast of Brazil, we had in the past maybe the most diverse ecosystem in the world.

We are aware how important it is this ecosystem.

Not far from the city, a small settlement is trying to live off the land and the forest without destroying it.

This is the small community of Valle Encantado, the enchanted valley in the mountains high above Rio de Janeiro.

There are very few places left that have a goal to preserve their place.

There are forty families here.

This is the house that I was born and raised in.

my father was also born and raised in this house.

Valle Encantado began at the end of the coffee boom in Brazil.

So our beginnings are in a new culture.

This whole area was planted.

There are very few houses here up until 1960s.

Recently the community decided to produce local gastronomy and ecotours.

I and another guide made the trails through the forest.

We preserve this place.

The trails aren't that wide and we always rotate our routes to avoid degradation.

We also have a kitchen and restaurant that all the women who come to work take advantage of the knowledge that their grandmas passed onto them and they pass onto their children.

We are a group of seven women, and we all work together We started developing recipes different from the ones that you find in Rio.

Banana belly buttons, jacalhau xuxu jelly, xuxu juice.

So these husks are actually the edible part.

These are developing bananas and they are not edible, they would be if they were left to ripen.

Actually, they are, evolutionarily speaking, similar to a cornhusk.

Kate Lyra- xuxu?

Dave- xuxu.

But then we got the banana bellybuttons, and we got the jock, the jackfruits, just within fifty yards of the kitchen.

We use all of these, we are making pie out of banana bellybutton and a salad out of xuxu.

We use everything.

This is jackfruit.

We cut it up, add seasonings, add a lot of garlic and a lot of oil.

As to the sustainability of the project, we try as best as we can to use what nature offers without damaging and degrading.

We have a lot of jackfruit here.

The use of jackfruit is a good thing, because we have so much that we need to get rid of some of it.

Kate- Delicious!

Dave- What did you try?

Kate- The bread with the bellybutton.

Dave- Okay, I'll try it Mmm The bellybutton bread.

Mmm, what a great combination of flavors.

So this meal is two thirds sustainable, which means they can produce it forever here.

It is their own stuff, it's not only local, but it grows in abundance so they can produce all that they need for the community, sell some outside bring some cash in and continue supposedly as long as they want.

I love Rio de Janeiro, but there is a lot to see in the Mata Atlantica along the coast.

I will be able to visit a colonial town, and even more intriguing, an indigenous village accessible only by boat.

And afterwards a town founded by escaped slaves.

Until about 1950 you couldn't drive here, you could only get here by boat.

It's a colonial town and at one point it was the most important colonial town in all of Brazil, why?

Because here is where the gold was mined in the interior in the state of Minas Gerias came down and boats picked it up, the town was enriched by the movement of that gold and is today become a UNESCO recognized patrimony city.

Dom Joao Orleans Braganca- It happened something unique in this world when those Dom Joao the Sixth King of Portugal, by great great grandfather came to Brazil when Napoleon invaded Portugal.

He took the whole Portugal court.

This monument marks a place along Caminho Real, the royal highway, and it was called royal because the King himself certified that it was one of his roads.

Very important.

It reached 500km into the interior to the mining town of Ouro Preto and the other mining town of Ouro Preto, both of which produced millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of gold.

Dom Joao- Portugal used to leave a certain percentage of the gold to Brazil.

Dave- To Brazil.

Dom Joao- But the majority, the big part was to Portugal.

It was the new world, like America at the time, and they didn't know what they would discover, what they would see on this vast continent and the first thing when they arrived in this area here was to see this big forest and mountains, it was like a curtain of forest and Paraty was the main port or protected bay, 70% of the population of Brazil is between the coast and 300km inside of the country because the occupation of the country is basically along the coast.

Dave- In the last couple of decades, tourists, especially Brazilian tourists have discovered Paraty.

You have a colonial town of unmatched beauty and preservation, you have the ocean laden with beaches and islands like nowhere else, you have the Mata Atlantica, the Atlantic forest, mostly well preserved.

I've lived here for over 70 years, 40 years working tourism, and 20 years as a fisherman.

A total of 60 years on the ocean.

There are 130 islands around Paraty, the only way to access them is by boat.

There is no electricity here, except for a few generators, and some gas lights.

All up and down the coast are small pockets of communities, small villages called Caicara which is a mixture of Portuguese and Indian ancestry.

Many of them are where they have been for centuries, if not longer.

Yeah, I was born here, yes I am, I'm 70 years old.

Here we sleep with the doors open, when we leave the house we don't need to lock anything, there are no worries.

Caicara are the ones born here, that are from here, out roots are here.

We are caicara He's a woodworker and these are works of art.

He makes them all himself, he makes many of his own tools.

So this massive piece of wood is hand carves and it's the guts of a manioc press.

Benedito is one talented man.

This is a Mata hawk feeding a snake to its young in the nest, and this is the famous church boat, it's an elegant sailboat but with its own church.

For thousands of years people have been living in this very area, living off the sea and off the land where crops were planted.

The forest has remained pretty well continuous, it have never been completely cut down, as we go past we can see places where it has been thinned, but then places where it is impenetrably thick, and that's a reassuring sign.

The Portuguese used slave labor to build the royal highway from the sea way into the interior where the gold was.

They brought African slaves to do that.

The slaves themselves often organized, escaped, and formed their own communities, which were called quilombos.

Several of them remain in the Atlantic forest.

Quilombo Campinho is a community located inside of Mata Atlantica South of Rio de Janeiro on the coast.

Today, approximately 150 families, or 500 people live here.

Our ancestors arrived here over 200 years ago.

There has always been a historic struggle over land.

This struggle ended in 1999 when the quilombo received title to these lands.

It was after slavery ended that these lands continued to produce coffee and sugar cane.

But the soil here was poor, so the land owners abandoned their land and donated it to the three women who worked here as house servants.

They had a special relationship with the land owners, so these lands were given to them.

These are the oldest women in the community.

We have to be thankful for everything that we have is because of them.

They have taught us everything about the struggle, how to live, how to make herbal medicine.

Some plants are good for making tea.

They showed us everything and passed on their knowledge to us.

These lands have been passed on from one generation to the other and we are now in our sixth generation.

So today we talk about slavery from a happy perspective because we are free.

We have been working with community based tourism for almost 20 years.

Tourism is important to us because it creates wealth in this community.

We have always worked the land without using agro toxins or chemical fertilizers, we continue to work the land in this way.

This material we use a lot here at the store.

It is a straw that we collect in the forest.

Here we have a store full of arts and crafts that was a dream of my mother Magdalena, who used to sell her handiwork in the center of town.

Now we have a large group here in the store, we sell directly to the consumer.

Today it's much better because before people had to go out of the community to work.

But now they can stay and work from home and sell their crafts.

We also use the food we produce in our community restaurant, so we are working with agroecology to bring the outside into the restaurant.

It's being done in a sustainable way to keep the farmers doing their job and bringing those foods to the table for the outside visitors, and most importantly to the people in our community.

So if we continue to work in the right way, we will create a better future for our children.

We will plant the right seeds, the good things will come.

We will harvest the fruits of all that work.

As we drive north from Paraty in the state of Rio de Janeiro, you go up through a ridge of mountains that is right next to the ocean, and that ridge traps a lot of moisture and makes for this dreamily gorgeous Atlantic rainforest.

Once you get over the top of that ridge, and we've just come over it, you get into a completely different landscape.

We're actually in the state of San Paolo and it's as if the political boundary is an ecological boundary.

Here is pasture land, there is, there's a huge plantation of Eucalyptus planted for pulp, but I can see some fields planted.

The vegetation is much more sparse.

So it's as if we moved to a different zone.

It's still considered part of the Atlantic forest, but we're almost in a different country.

There's a different kind of Atlantic forest in Itachaia National Park.

It's Brazil's first National Park, it's in from the coast, located about midway between the city of Rio de Janeiro and the city of San Paolo.

Itachaia National Park is in one of Brazil's big mountain ranges, it reaches almost 9000 feet.

Because we're up on the slopes of it we do get a lot of fog, but it can get very dry here, but when the fog moves in, it makes it mysterious as though you're in some kind of weird place.

The park was established in 1937, and before that there were people who lived in this area, that lived off hunting and cutting some timber, although how they got the timber out of here, I don't know.

They're long gone, but I appreciate the trails they made, and sometimes you can even see some of their old houses, like this one.

This is a substantial building so whoever was responsible for building it stayed here for a while.

Hauling all of the materials, the concrete, the tiles, the brick, would have been a heck of a chore.

So how do I know that this house has been abandoned for a long time?

It's because this tree has grown up in the living room, and is now, looks to me like at least 100 feet tall.

And while they may grow fairly fast, that is close to an 80, 90 year old tree.

I was hoping that my binoculars would enable me to see some mammals here.

There are supposed to be perhaps 8 different species of primates, monkeys, mostly small ones like marmosets.

South America really doesn't have big animals, big mammals, the great herbivores like we do in North America.

And the mammals that they do have are often concealed in forests, so mammals are harder to come by on this continent.

The composition of this forest is very distinct here.

If you look up high you see there are some very tall trees, maybe 150 feet, some of them palms, but it's not a consistent tall canopy.

Isolated tall trees, many many palms, forming a second story, and then forming a third story is bamboo, bamboo everywhere, and tree ferns which is an unusual combination, especially when you see, as you can see over there, coniferous trees, some kind of pine.

So it's a strange mix, and down on the ground we have more ferns, and little annuals, and at certain times of years we'd see their flowers.

But it's got its own composition, different from the amazon forest, different from the Atlantic forest down on the coast.

It's I think distinct Itachaia.

There are inside the park chalets lodges where people can come and stay and see birds to their hearts content.

It's rustic but it's rewarding for the worlds birders.

Brazilians are used to seeing toucans, but international visitors are just entranced by them, with good reason.

For several years I was director of the Tucson Audubon Society, and I have seen birds and birds and birds, but this is ridiculous.

There's buntings, there's gold finches, there's flycatchers, there's humming, hummingbirds, speaking of hummingbirds, then there are all kinds of tropical birds that I can't even begin to identify.

It's easy to name one of them the Jacu, they are a peacock like bird that are everywhere, semi-domesticated because they are fed here, but they are charismatic.

There's not only a great variety of hummingbirds, but they all have different behavior.

These black ones that flash white, they call them black jacketons, they are very aggressive and drive the others away, but they hover which means I can see them.

Now the others flit in and flit out, the Brazilian ruby, oh look at that, that red, that charismatic, oh my goodness that blue iridescence of that bird, that's a swallow tanager.

The female is really green, which is unusual in birds, because usually the males are gorgeous and the females are drab, but in this case they're just different.

We have parrotlets parakeets, and the noisy ones.

Squawk, those are the parrots.

Brazil's Atlantic rainforest is probably the most diverse in the world.

Over the past 500 years over 90 percent of it has been destroyed.

Brazilian conservationists, in cooperation with international conservation groups are working frantically to protect the remaining 8-9 percent, but Brazil's population is growing rapidly, and the government faces a daunting task in protecting this forest, the Mata Atlantica.

Join us next time In the Americas with David Yetman For the westward traveler in northern Montana, the great plains seem to stretch out forever.

Until the Rockies suddenly jut up into the sky.

Blackfeet live in both places and they're going back to their ancient roots, reviving their bison herds... To be amongst the buffalo here, there is like a spiritual uplifting... And their ties with the land that go back for millennia.

music Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

Copies of this and other episodes of In the Americas with David Yetman are available from the Southwest Center.

To order call 1-800-937-8632.

Please mention the episode number and the program title.

Please be sure to visit us at intheamericas.com or intheamericas.org