| ||On the border between Argentina and Brazil, the 230-foot
(70-m) Iguazu falls form a semicircle 1.67 miles (2,700 m)
across, which attracts 1.5 million tourists every year. On the
Argentine side, the falls are part of the Iguazu National Park,
which was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 1984. The
park is home to 44 percent of the country’s animal species and
is one of the best-preserved remnants of South America’s
Atlantic forest. This unique subtropical forest ecosystem runs
along Brazil’s ocean fringe and stretches slightly inland in
Paraguay and Argentina. It is regarded as one of the ﬁve
highest-priority areas for the preservation of the world’s
biodiversity, a “hot spot” where 20,000 types of plant
live—8,000 of them endemic—as well as 1,668 species of land
vertebrates, of which more than a third are found nowhere else.
This wealth of biodiversity has been granted a stay of
execution, for deforestation and urban development have already
destroyed 90 percent of the original habitat. Visit the YA