A natural jewel. In northern Guatemala, on the border with Mexico, Laguna del Tigre National Park is home to the largest freshwater wetland in Central America. Spanning 338,000 hectares, it is the country’s largest national park and one of six areas making up the Maya Biosphere Reserve. The territory boasts a rare diversity of ecosystems: humid tropical forests, riparian forests along waterways, swamps, marshes, lagoons, flood-prone savannas, extraordinary stands of red mangroves, and even a freshwater mollusk reef.

In the early 1980s, Guatemala decided to protect these ecosystems by creating a national park. At the same time, the American company Texaco discovered that the area’s subsoil held an oil field known as “Xan,” whose potential was then estimated at 400 million barrels.

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