The Presence of Human Settlement in National

Parks of Latin America as Depicted on Maps

John Kelly

May 22, 2011

Introduction

The National Park concept developed mainly in the United States during the late 19th

century, and was adopted by many other countries throughout the 20th century. The

countries of Latin America generally had a relatively late start in creating national park

systems, until the 1990s, when environmental conservation became a higher priority

throughout most of the region, spurred in part by the UNESCO (United Nations) Man and

the Biosphere Program, as well as by indigenous political groups who saw natural reserves

(protected areas) as an indirect means to their gaining greater control over land use in

their areas of habitation. How well do maps reflect both the adoption of the national park

idea in Latin America, and the presence of human habitation (often “indigenous”, by most

definitions of the word) which distinguishes post-1990 protected areas in much of Latin

America from their counterparts in the United States?

This modest review of maps illustrating these developments will focus on paper maps

(not internet-based ones, nor atlases or guidebooks), specifically designed for visitors to

one particular national park or biosphere reserve in Latin America. However, to extend the

sample and to offer some context, several maps which do not meet all these criteria were

also examined: one from a road atlas, one from a guidebook, two maps which cover an

entire country (or several countries) rather than being specific to a park, and two maps

from outside Latin America (one from Spain, the other from the United States.) All maps

which could be located in the University of Kansas Anschutz map library that fit all the

criteria were included. Sixteen maps were considered, dating from 1950 up to 2010.

Argentina, 1950 – 1975

Until the economic benefits of ecotourism began to grow in the late 20th century, any

country’s government tended not to turn its attention to setting aside territory for the

purpose of environmental conservation until it had attained a certain level of prosperity.

Thus, it is no coincidence that the United States developed the national park concept,

during the post-Civil War industrial expansion and especially during the Gilded Age which

followed. For similar reasons, it is appropriate that Argentina was the first Latin American

country to forge a notional park system; by the first decade of the 20th century, Argentina

was enjoying rapid industrial and economic growth, based on exports of beef to Europe and

a quickly developing manufacturing base. Argentina’s first national park was Nahuel

Huapi, on the northern border of the largely “untamed” Patagonia region, at the foothills

and peaks of the Andes mountain range, where a large lake makes the landscape

reminiscent of Switzerland.

The 1934 founding of the national park service and of Nahuel Huapi National Park

was for three reasons: the “conservation of nature,” the “security of national sovereignty by

creating settlements of stable populations,” and “to obtain economic self-sufficiency for

local populations” (Oyola-Yemail 2000, p. 90). Thus, from the start, there was an

acknowledgment in Latin American governments of the existence of local inhabitants, to a

greater degree than the U.S. model – as well as a reference to the national border conflicts

which even today disturb the peace of many Latin American countries.

One particularly visible manifestation of Argentina’s sudden (and, for much of the

population, short-lived) prosperity was the widespread purchase of automobiles by the

growing middle class, especially just after World War II. The first Latin American national

park maps which found their way to the Anschutz map library were produced for, and

distributed by, the Automovil Club Argentino, an organization clearly modeled on the

American Automobile Association of the United States. The library has four maps which

show essentially the same area, and used the same topographic base data. Two maps date

from 1950 (one in English), one from 1961, and one from 1975. The first three maps are

really two maps in one: the obverse is of most of Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi, at

1:340,000; the reverse shows the same Nahuel Huapi park as well as two others, Lainin,

and Los Alcerces, at 1:410,000. The 1975 map focuses on the resort town of San Carlos de

Bariloche, and dispenses with the three-park map.

The 1950 maps (Figures 1 and 2) are clear and well-designed, with typography and

features reminiscent of, but not identical to, AAA maps. They include unobtrusive, simple

shaded relief, and a distinct hierarchy of road types and settlement sizes. The obverse of

the English version includes concentric blue lines in the lake interiors, a strangely no-

longer-fashionable element in an otherwise modern-looking map. Park boundaries are

Fig. 1. 1950 map of Nahuel Huapi National Park, Argentina (detail)

Fig. 2. c. 1950 map of Nahuel Huapi National Park, Argentina, in English (detail)

depicted as a fine dotted line with a thick (half-inch), translucent colored band on the

interior side of the polygon boundary.

As well as the expected resort-related habitation, there is a great deal of human

settlement depicted in both maps; indeed, there is no appreciable difference in the density

of human habitation shown within the parks as compared to the considerable area

included outside them.

Isolated farmsteads, ranch compounds, or other buildings are shown as small black

squares, identified as “casa” or “house” in the legends; group of a few houses are identified

as “lugar” or “place”; and several towns (“pueblos”) are shown, as irregular black polygons

broken up by negative-space major roads. Many of the farms and inhabited places are

given toponyms, carefully translated in the English version (e.g., “Chac. Montes” becomes

“Montes Farm” -- “chacay” appears to be a local word, derived from Quechua or Mapuche –

and “Esatancia” becomes “Ranch”.) The 1961 map is virtually identical, as is the 1975 map

(aside from more modern typography). The role of Argentina’s national parks as

demonstrations of national human presence near potentially contested national borders is

evident on all these maps, rather than untrammeled nature.

A 1959 map of a different national park, Las Glaciares, was published directly by the

Argentina’s national park service (Fig. 3). This black-and-white map is simpler than the

Fig. 3. 1959 map of Los Glaciares National Park, Argentina (detail)

automobile club’s products, but it is based on the same government topographic base data,

and is equally complete in its inclusion of human settlement and rural private land

ownership, as can be seen in the three point symbols of “cabecera” (county seat), “pueblo”

(town), and “casa” (house). Again, most of the farmsteads and ranches are given personal

toponyms, e.g. “Ea. La Union” (estancia) in the upper right corner of Figure 3.

As Argentina has long looked to Europe for its templates in architecture, design, and

cultural inspiration, more than most Latin American countries, it is worthwhile to compare

these maps to a Spanish map of a roughly similar geographic situation in the Pyrenees

Mountains, also near a national boundary (with France). This map (Fig. 4) is on the reverse

of a map of the eastern Pyrenees published by the Spanish branch of the Firestone tire

company, and shows the Aigues Tortes y Lago de San Mauricio, founded in 1955 as Spain’s

fifth national park. Its design is almost identical to the Michelin tire company’s maps of

France, with the addition of beautifully rendered axonometric (oblique-view) mountains

along the central spine of the range. These drawn mountains at first give an impression of

unscientific informality in an otherwise precise, plan-view map, but their range of gray

tones was at least carefully calibrated to not entirely obscure the features and lettering

they overlap with.

Fig. 4. 1968 map of Parque Nacional de Aigues Tortes y Lago de San Mauricio, Spain (detail)

Unlike in the Argentina maps, this Spanish map shows no permanent human

habitation within the national park boundaries, only a few “refugios” (cabins for hikers)

and “ermitas” (chapels). Perhaps Spain had more confidence than Argentina in the security

and uncontested permanence of its national boundaries, and so its national park system

had, like those of the United States, the conservation of nature as its clear primary mandate.

What the map omits is a different kind of sovereignty struggle which was occurring in the

region: that between the federal government in Spain and its now-semi-autonomous

regions such as Catalonia. When this map was made, the Franco dictatorship maintained

centralized control, and regional expressions of authority were suppressed; however,

twenty years after this map, the Catalan regional government asserted its new semi-

independence, first by declaring its own “buffer zone” around the park, and then in 1997 by

legally wresting most management responsibilities for the entire park from Spain

(Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici National Park 2011).

Costa Rica, 1983 – 2005

Since the 1970 founding of its national park system (CentralAmerica.com 2011), Costa

Rica has enjoyed a reputation as an environmentally friendly country, a more politically

stable and safe tourist destination than the other nations of Central America. It is not

surprising that most of the Anschutz collection’s maps specifically for national parks in

Central America are from Costa Rica, as well as its oldest such map (1983); what is perhaps

more surprising is that none of the maps are specific to a single national park, but rather

show off the country’s entire park system. One guidebook with maps specific to a national

park, that of Corcovado (1992), was found in the university’s main book collection, and is

included in this analysis; therefore, the focus here on the country-wide maps will be on this

same park, on the Osa Peninsula along the southern part of Costa Rica’s Pacific coast.

This 1:500,000-scale map was produced by the independent publisher INCAFO, but in

collaboration with the country’s National Geographic Institute, and was clearly intended to

boldly proclaim Costa Rica’s eco-friendly image. With parks shown in bright orange, and

the title of the map in a giant font, the map is more suitable as a wall decoration than for a

tourist to use during explorations in the parks.

By the 1980s, the national park model was undergoing significant modifications to

adapt to the growing awareness of indigenous rights in many developing (and a few

developed) countries, and to the expectation of some visitors that a park visit could be a

Fig. 5. 1983 map of the national parks of Costa Rica (detail)

Fig. 6. 1990 road map of of Costa Rica (detail)

cultural as well as a wilderness experience. This map reflects this trend to a degree; five

villages are shown within the Corcovado park polygon, about the same density as in the

rest of the Osa Peninsula. A 1990 highway map (Fig. 6), in contrast, fails to show human

presence in this park; while this may be due to its smaller scale of 1:1 million, it does not

accurately reflect the uniquely human history of Corcovado Park. Unlike most of Costa

Rica’s national parks, Corcovado was founded not because of some dramatic natural

landscape or especially biodiverse hotspot, but rather because of an opportunity arising

from a dispute. “In 1975, due to conflicts between squatters, the Costa Rican government,

and the Osa Forest Products [logging company], the land owned by the US company was

expropriated by the government” (Pedersen1992, p. 17); today, park rangers still struggle

to expel gold miners.

Another consequence of the growing acknowledgment of human claims to park

territories in the last decades of the 20th century was a proliferation in the categories of

protected areas; besides the long-standing differences among the jurisdictional hierarchy

(national, state, county, city), a complex and subtle continuum from strict nature preserve

to various blends of human activities developed in much of the world, as reflected in the

International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s attempt at a global classification

system. This trend is visible in the 2002 map of Costa Rica’s park system, which essentially

replaces the 1983 map. Now, the title (given in both Spanish and English) has become

“National Parks and Other Protected Areas,” and the list of such areas in the legend

includes “National Park,” “Biological Reserve,” and “other Protected Area”. This map (Fig. 7)

depicts this complexity in the labels for the parks, but not, alas, in the cartographic

symbolization; despite the lovely style of elevation colors, and the detailed inclusion of

villages and roads, all protected areas are shown with the same single-green-line boundary

symbol (dashed for marine boundaries). Besides downplaying the complexity of park

types, the lack of any kind of interior-exterior distinction makes it difficult, in several

places, to tell which side of a line represents a park polygon.

However, to its credit, this map – an admirable collaboration among the government

(National Geographic Institute), an international conservation and development NGO

(Fundacion Neotropoca), and a commercial interest (Texaco oil company) – is the first in

this analysis to include a specifically indigenous reserve, the Reserva Indigena Guaymi de

Fig. 7. 2002 map of Costa Rica’s national parks and other protected areas (detail)

Fig. 8. Map of Osa Peninsula from 1992 guidebook to Corcovado National Park, Costa Rica (detail)

Osa. Surrounded by the Corcovado National Park as well as by a forest reserve, and also

bordering private, non-reserve land, this polygon can be seen in the middle of Fig. 7, and as

the red shape in Fig. 8, a map found in a 1992 guidebook to the park and its surrounding

region.

The indigenous presence in Costa Rica is not as widespread or deep as in the other

countries of Central America, but it does exist, particularly in the southeastern portion of

both coastal areas, and the inland mountains, near the border with Panama. The land

tenure options available to indigenous peoples in Latin America varies from country to

country; Honduras, Mexico, and Guatemala, for example, lack any active legal mechanism

for specifically indigenous reserves, and therefore rely on indirect means (the tattered

remnants of the post-Revolutionary social property system in Mexico, or the co-

management of nature reserve in Honduras), while Panama and, to a lesser degree,

Nicaragua, have state-level administrative entities dedicated to partly autonomous

indigenous control. Costa Rica, like the United States and Canada, has a modest indigenous

reservation system. The Guaymi reserve shown bordering Corcovado Park was decreed in

1985 (Sierra et al. 2003, p. 8), and indigenous efforts to enlarge it, at the expense of the

park, were struck down by national government lawyers in 2010 (Ibarra 2010).

The 2002 map, as well as a rather similar 2005 English-language map of Costa Rica

and Panama published by the ecotourism-directed travel series Rough Guides, clearly

shows the human presence within Corcovado Park (the 1992 guidebook map had not

shown human settlements within the park). The 2008 bilingual map produced by

International Travel Maps (of all of Central America, on two sides, at 1:1,100,000) takes

this human presence a step further , by omitting the national park altogether (Fig. 9). This

may simply be an oversight, but does in fact fit with the map’s overall style of downplaying

national parks and other protected areas, by symbolizing their boundaries as subtle dashed

green lines, or as point symbols without any boundary. This may represent the logical next

step in the trend away from highlighting national parks in these countries as special

destinations set off from the human sphere, and instead as just another entity woven into

the cultural fabric.

Fig. 9. 2005 map of Central America (detail)

Honduras, 1998

Both trends seen in Costa Rica’s image as depicted in maps – of first emphasizing the

new environmental awareness, then focusing on the environment’s integration with

existing indigenous cultures – are reflected in how Honduras has chosen to portray its

national park system to the world, as demonstrated in a 1998 bilingual map unabashedly

titled “Map of Honduras for Investors, Identifying Business Opportunities” (Fig. 10).

Perhaps surprising, given the private corporations the map is trying to attract, is the clarity

with which the country’s late-start but impressively extensive protected area is shown;

apparently, the amenity value of these natural attractions is seen to outweigh the

implication of lands unavailable for private exploitation. All natural protected areas are

clearly and accurately shown, with different shades of green representing specific

categories, including “national parks” and UNESCO-sanctioned “biosphere reserves”.

Human presence is shown within these national parks as villages, with the same density

Fig. 10. 1998 map of Honduras, “for investors” (detail)

as elsewhere on the map. However, the parks as shown on the map do hide an even greater

land tenure complexity regarding the Miskitu and Pech (Tawahka) indigenous peoples who

inhabit them, in three aspects. First, the actual ownership of the lands varies from park to

park; in Tawahka, for example, the land technically belongs to the government’s forestry

agency, not to the people as a whole (“terreno nacional” (CCAD 2005, p. 11). Second, there

are zones within some of the parks (e.g., Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve) where

indigenously-managed human settlement is allowed, but not in other zones. Third, the

environmental problems and simmering land ownership disputes occasioned by the

ongoing differences between indigenous peoples (generally small-scale agriculturalists,

hunters, and fishers) and non-indigenous “internal colonists” (usually large-scale cattle

ranchers) is not apparent in the map, although it could be inferred by the well-informed

user by the dashed-line road penetrating the Rio Platano Reserve just beyond the

settlement appropriately named “La Colonia”.

Conclusion

Since the mind-1990s, geographers specializing in national parks and other natural

reserves have severely criticized the colonialist attitude which, they claim, pervades these

state-sanctioned territorial interventions (Parker 2010, p. 152). The creation of national

parks in the developing world is especially subject to criticism, as it requires an assumption

that the space so designated be wilderness, devoid of human occupation and tenure

(Neumann 2002); yet, recent scholarship has revealed that even parks in the United States

were spaces contested by existing inhabitants (Jacoby 2001). This brief historical review of

maps of national parks and other protected areas in Latin America shows how well they

reflect each country’s evolving concept of parks: in general, a trend from wilderness jewels

toward cultural constructions. However, there are also interesting departures from this

trend which reveal priorities peculiar to specific countries, such as Argentina’s desire to

demonstrate its sovereignty over border territories through human presence even from

the very beginning of its relatively venerable park system.

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Automovil Club Argentino. 1961. Bariloche. [One map shows most of Parque Nacional

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