A primal forest faces ruination

Aerial view of a quarry in the Cerro Blanco Forest in southern Ecuador. Immense craters are leaving clearings in a corridor of forest that borders the Ecuadorean city of Guayaquil and extends to Peru. — AFP

A HILLY forest that is a bastion of exceptional flora and fauna next to Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil, is now threatened by mining, urbanisation and deforestation. Cerro Blanco – white hill in English – is a vast tropical dry forest that has been gradually devoured by the port city of three million people.

In the last 15 years, Cerro Blanco has become an “island locked up and encircled by the city,” said Eliana Molineros, who created a foundation to protect wild animals.