Send in the Clouds
Like pretty much everyone in Ecuador, Roque Sevilla drives fast. I hurtle with him from the capital of Quito down two and a half hours of gut-stirring switchbacks, losing elevation with every turn. The sugar-cane and cattle farmsteads tumbling past on either side dwindle steadily, while the surrounding forests gain in age and power.
Sevilla talks the whole way. Slender, mustached and hugely energetic, he recites the names of tree species, describes different hummingbirds and tells stories about the foundations of Ecuador’s conservation movement. “I have been in Europe, Africa, Asia and North America,” he says, “but Ecuador — and I don’t say this only because it is my home — is truly special.”
Sevilla should know. He is a former mayor of Quito and a member of the National Council of the World Wildlife Fund. He also runs the country’s largest tourism company
At a fork in the road, signs present us with a typically Ecuadorean choice: Paraiso (Paradise) on the left and La Delicia (the Delight) on the right. Sevilla goes right. The air thickens; the road turns to clay and gets wet. Unbroken walls of trees scroll past. Finally we come over a last rib of the cordillera and drop into the white.
White, white, white — at first that’s all I can see, not the jungly hills I’ve imagined, or the bright flashes of equatorial birds — nothing more than streaming curtains of cloud creeping up valleys, folding over ridges, veiling the world.
Only in shreds and glimpses do I begin to see trees. They pass us in ghostly walls, so close together and so diverse in species that the eye hardly knows how to parse them into individuals. Dozens of plants hang from, cling to or wrap every one of them — vines, mosses, ferns, bromeliads, orchids as tiny as my fingernail and orchids as big as my forearm.
This is Mashpi Rainforest Biodiversity Reserve, a recently formed private concession on the western slopes of the Andes, a last piece of Ecuadorean cloud forest at the southern end of what ecologists call the Chocó-Darién biogeographic region. In May, the Municipality of Quito declared 45,500 acres of this forest a “natural protected area”; that reserve envelops the heart of Mashpi, 2,891 acres that belong to Roque Sevilla.
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