The mysterious Cerro El Cono or ‘cone hill’ in the Peruvian Amazon has many secrets, and because of its location and special protections, it’s likely those are secrets it will keep.
From its intriguing pyramid-like shape to rare and endangered animals and plants that live around it, the ‘cone hill’ is likely home to many more species as yet unknown to science, and has never been climbed.
Why the mystery?
It’s easy to believe that with modern technology there are very few areas of the planet that haven’t been surveyed and studied, but in this case, there are very particular reasons.
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The area is part of the Sierra del Divisor National Park, created in 2015, which consists of 3.3 million acres of rainforest on the Peru-Brazil border. This is a vast area, and difficult terrain to reach and move through, with dense jungle and rough ground. As a national park, the area also has a number of protections in place to restrict exploration and tourism.
This area is also home to the indigenous Iskonawa peoples, who regard the area around Cerro El Cono part of their ancestral territories. First contacted in 1958, a UNESCO report from 2019 describes several groups as likely living in ‘voluntary isolation’ in the area.
The exact size of the Iskonawa population is unknown but some sources list from between 100 to only 25 individuals. As such, the laguage Iskonawa is also extremely endangered, and efforts have been made to try and record it from some of the last native speakers before it is lost forever.
Is it natural or man-made?
The most striking feature of Cerro El Cono, and the one that gives it its name, is the tall, pointed conical shape. It looks almost unnatural, and has led to myths and stories of the hill being the remains of a man-made pyramid.
While the exact geological history of the area hasn’t been determined, samples taken by geologists in the early and mid 20th century show that it's actually the remnants of a volcano. The solid core has remained, while the layers around it have gradually eroded away over thousands of years to form the distinctive shape.
The peak of Cerro El Cono towers above the surrounding forest canopy and, like many other aspects of this intriguing feature, exact figures are hard to come by. Most sources agree that it sits roughly 500m elevation above sea level, and just over 200m above its surroundings.
What wildlife live there?
The area around Cerro El Cano is, like much of the Amazon, incredibly rich in biodiversity, but sadly also many of the species present there are endangered. Of 38 medium to large mammal species confirmed as present in the National Park, 20 are listed as threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.
These include the Peruvian spider monkey, Ateles chamek, and the woolly monkey (Lagothrix poeppigii), both listed as endangered. The moustached tamarin, Saguinus mystax, is likely common in the area, whereas much harder to spot would be the nocturnal and evocatively-named Nancy Ma’s night monkey, Aotus nancymaae.
Large carnivores such as jaguar and puma roam the forests, as does the Giant armadillo (Priodontis maximus) whose burrows often provide habitat for other animals.
Combine strict protections with little human disturbance, mix in some varied terrain and geographical features that favour evolutionary diversification, and the result is likely to include organisms that have yet to be discovered by science.
The Field Museum conducted a Rapid Biological Inventory in 2005 of the Sierra Del Divisor National Park, and while the research team were only in the field for less than three weeks, they discovered multiple new species of plants, trees, amphibians and fish.
Cerro El Cono itself, due to its usual shape, composition and location, may act like an ecological island, providing the environment that encourages the evolutionary development of unique populations, sub-species and species.
But the mystery remains as long as the protection does, and it’s both confounding and critical. Yes, being able to access and study these areas would unveil these new species. But these species may have only survived because their environment has been carefully protected from human interaction. Can Cerro El Cono survive human curiosity?
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