JAGUARS GO FROM ZERO TO 50: A REWILDING MILESTONE AND THE FIRST-EVER RECORDED VISITOR SIGHTING
For the first time, visitors to Iberá National Park have been able to observe and document a wild jaguar roaming free in the 2-million-acre park. While Rewilding Argentina’s decade-long reintroduction project is bringing back over a dozen species, the most crucial has been the jaguar, largest cat in the Americas, in the Northeastern province where it had gone extinct. Thanks to rewilding efforts, there are now 50 documented jaguars in the wild in this vast ecosystem, the second-largest wetland of South America.
MAY 18, 2026–Corrientes, AR For the first time ever, a wild jaguar has been documented by visitors in Iberá National Park. Ombú, a juvenile male, was resting on a trail, spotted the visitors, and made a calm exit, captured on video from a distance. The thrilling encounter, which has since been repeated by other park visitors, marks a new era for wildlife watching, as the great American predators return to the wetlands as part of the living landscape of Iberá.
Ombú is part of a groundbreaking decade-long reintroduction project carried out by the Province of Corrientes, the National Parks Administration, and Rewilding Argentina, the off spring of Tompkins Conservation.
“Recent sightings of other jaguars around the wetlands show that the species is dispersing from San Alonso Island, where they were first released,” according to Sebastian Di Martino, Conservation Director at Rewilding Argentina. “Little by little, they are reclaiming different habitats within the Great Iberá Park, thereby reconnecting the landscapes where they had disappeared decades ago.”
The return of the jaguar reflects years of collaborative work among institutions, scientists, park rangers, rural producers, tour guides, and local communities who have learned to coexist once again with the ecosystem’s apex predator. Community acceptance has been a key factor in the lasting recovery of the species.
Nature-based tourism, which attracts 60,000 visitors annually to Ibera, has created new economic opportunities for approximately 200,000 residents in the 20 towns surrounding the Great Iberá Park. “This sighting proves that conservation and development can go hand in hand. The return of the jaguar places Corrientes at the global forefront of ecological restoration and, at the same time, generates jobs and new opportunities for our people,” said the governor of Corrientes, Juan Pablo Valdés.
THE JAGUAR’S STEADY RETURN
This historic sighting coincides with another major milestone: the population of free-roaming jaguars in Iberá has now reached 50 registered individuals. Corrientes, where the species had been completely extinct for more than seventy years, is now the world’s first project to successfully reintroduce the jaguar into a region where it had gone extinct.
Implemented by Tompkins Conservation, together with Rewilding Argentina, the project began in 2012 with the construction of the Jaguar Reintroduction Center on San Alonso Island, in the heart of the two-million-acre protected wetlands. Thanks to the joint efforts of government agencies, conservation organizations, scientists, and international experts, as well as the collaboration of institutions in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay, a founding population was established, enabling the first releases in 2021.
The results have been encouraging. Corrientes went from having no free-roaming jaguars to hosting nearly 20% of the jaguars in Argentina. Iberá is also on track to becoming the national park with the largest population and density of jaguars in the country, an international benchmark in ecological restoration and rewilding.
HOW JAGUARS IMPACT ECOSYSTEM RECOVERY
The jaguar plays a fundamental role in the health of ecosystems. As an apex predator, it regulates populations of other species and has positive effects throughout the food chain. As such, return means not only the recovery of an iconic species, but also the restoration of essential ecological processes.
Scientific teams from CONICET, Proyecto Yaguareté, and Rewilding Argentina, with support from the National Geographic Society, are currently conducting studies to assess the ecological impacts of the species’ return to Iberá.
The experience in Corrientes also made it possible to expand the work to El Impenetrable National Park, in the province of Chaco, where a complementary project has been underway since 2020 to strengthen the wild jaguar population where a small remnant population exclusively consisting of male individuals had brought it to the brink of local extinction.
The Status of the Jaguar in the Gran Chaco
The jaguar (Panthera onca) is the largest cat on the American continent. Males can reach 2.50 meters in length, including the tail, and weigh up to 140 kilos.
The species was once distributed from the southern United States to south-central Argentina. However, over the past 200 years, it has disappeared from its historical range primarily due to hunting, a decline in prey abundance, and the destruction and fragmentation of its habitat. Currently, the species occupies just 5% of its historical range in the country.
The Gran Chaco ecoregion, which spans Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina, is home to extremely high biodiversity, making it a key site for jaguar conservation. However, this complex of protected areas and private lands faces major threats to the conservation of this and other species. In Argentina, the jaguar population of the Semi-Arid Chaco currently consists of fewer than 20 jaguars, making it the most threatened in the country, compared to populations in the Paranaense Forest (Misiones) and the Yungas region (Salta and Jujuy). Causes of this collapse include intense illegal hunting and the loss of natural habitats where the species lives, with the rate of deforestation in the Semi-Arid Chaco considered one of the highest in South America.
The scenario also plays out in Paraguay, where the highest rate of land-use change for the implementation of agricultural systems is observed in the Dry Chaco region.