It is one of the colossi of Amazonia, reaching heights of up to 60 meters. If you look up, you can make out its crown above the canopy; on the ground, its aerial roots are sometimes as much as 2 meters high. To get close to a shihuahuaco is to feel very small indeed. Yet while this tree impresses with its size, it also does so with its longevity: The oldest specimens exceed 1,000 years.

"The shihuahuaco commands respect and admiration," said the woman who has become the most high-profile advocate for the struggle to preserve the species. The 46-year-old forestry engineer Tatiana Espinosa heads a conservation concession that covers almost 1,000 hectares in southeastern Peru's Madre de Dios region. The NGO Arbio, which Espinosa co-founded with her two sisters over 10 years ago, is based in the heart of this Amazon region, one of the largest in the country and a critical biodiversity area.

Here, the shihuahuaco is king. Espinosa inventoried hundreds of specimens that are at least 500 years old. "The shihuahuacos are the pillars of the ecosystem, their backbone," she said."They are connected to the whole forest through a network of roots and communication which they have woven over hundreds of years and during which they have developed ecological niches and natural habitats for micro-organisms and different animal groups that rely on them to reproduce." One of them is the ferocious harpy, the largest bird of prey on the South American continent. This endangered species needs giant trees and strong branches to nest its eggs. Red and blue macaws, bats and monkeys have also made their home here.

Extremely hard and resistant

But the habitats of all these species are "threatened by its massive extraction," said Espinosa. More than 530,000 tonnes of shihuahuaco wood worth $500 million (€464 million) were exported from Peru between 2012 and 2020, according to a Latin American collaborative journalistic survey.

Prized for its extremely hard, resistant wood (known in English as ironwood), shihuahuaco – also called coumarou ordDipteryx – is exported to China (70%) and to Europe, particularly France, one of the main buyers of this tropical wood. Thousand-year-old shihuahuaco trees are used as wood flooring in homes and terraces all over the world, and international demand continues to grow. It is currently Peru's most commercially valuable wood thanks to the increasing scarcity of other species, such as mahogany and cedar, whose populations have virtually disappeared in some areas and whose trade is more strictly regulated.

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