The Acarai Mountains: Where the Essequibo Begins

Straddling the border between Guyana and Brazil in the country's remote southern interior, the Acarai Mountains are one of Guyana's four principal mountain ranges, alongside the Imataka, Kanuku, and Pakaraima mountains. Low, wet, and thickly forested, the range is unremarkable in elevation, its unnamed highest point reaching just 1,009 m (3,310 ft), but it holds outsized significance as the source of the Essequibo River, Guyana's longest and most important waterway, along with the Courantyne River, which forms part of the border with Suriname.

Mapped Late, Sourced Later Still

The Acarai Mountains first appeared on a European map in 1821, when French geographer Adrien-Hubert Brué labeled the range Sierra do Acaray. Remarkably, given how long the range had been known to exist, the precise source of the Essequibo River within it was not identified until 2013, when a joint Guyanese-German survey team finally traced the river to its exact headwaters deep in the mountains. The Essequibo, along with the wider Konashen Indigenous District it drains through its tributaries, the Kamoa, Sipu, Kassikaityu, and Chodikar rivers, remains one of Guyana's principal sources of fresh water and, further downstream, is also the river at the center of Guyana's long-running territorial dispute with Venezuela, which claims roughly two-thirds of Guyana's national territory west of the river.

The Wai-Wai: A People Once Presumed Extinct

The Acarai Mountains are home to a single village, Masakenari, inhabited by the Indigenous Wai-Wai people, whose ancestors were, remarkably, once presumed extinct as a distinct group before surviving communities were rediscovered. Today, the Wai-Wai population straddles the Guyana-Brazil border: in Guyana, roughly 200 people live within the Konashen Amerindian Community, an officially titled territory of 648,860 hectares (1.6 million acres) that includes the Acarai range and the Essequibo headwaters, while related Wai-Wai communities live across the border in Brazil's Roraima state.

Guyana's Largest Protected Area, Run By Its Own People

In 2004, the Wai-Wai of Konashen made the landmark decision to place the entirety of their titled rainforest under formal protection, creating the Konashen Community Owned Conservation Area (COCA), Guyana's first protected area of its kind and, at roughly 625,000 hectares (1.5 million acres), the largest protected area in the country, covering approximately 3% of Guyana's total land area. Developed with technical and financial support from Conservation International and legally recognized under Guyana's national parliament, the reserve, also referred to as the Kanashen Amerindian Protected Area, stands alongside Bolivia's Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco as one of the clearest examples anywhere in South America of a major protected area created and managed by the Indigenous community whose land it is, rather than imposed upon it from outside.

A Rainforest of Giants and Rarities

A 2006 Rapid Biological Assessment of the Konashen COCA, covering the Acarai Mountains and the Sipu, Kamoa, and Essequibo rivers, found the region's forests in pristine, largely undisturbed condition. Researchers recorded 26 amphibian species and 34 reptile species, including the first confirmed record in Guyana of the blind snake Typhlophis ayarzaguenai, along with several other species that may represent new records for the country. The forest's larger, more charismatic residents include the jaguar (Panthera onca), harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja), giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla), and giant river otter (Pteronura brasiliensis), while its canopy includes hardwood trees the Wai-Wai know as manyokinaballi (Geissospermum spp.) and kakaralli (Eschweilera spp.).

Conclusion

The Acarai Mountains are, in a sense, a study in contrasts: a range so remote its principal river's exact source went undiscovered until 2013, yet one whose surrounding forest has been so thoroughly documented and so deliberately protected by the community that calls it home that it now stands as Guyana's largest conservation area. As the source of a river now central to a major international boundary dispute, and as the ancestral territory of a people who nearly vanished from history altogether, the Acarai Mountains hold a significance far out of proportion to their modest height.