Maria

— Biography

María grew up on the banks of the Mamoré River in Trinidad, capital of the Beni department — the heart of Bolivian Amazonia. As a child she accompanied her father, a fishing guide, on overnight river trips into the flooded pampas. She went on to study wildlife biology at the Universidad Autónoma Gabriel René Moreno (UAGRM) in Santa Cruz, graduating with a thesis on pink river dolphin population dynamics in the middle Mamoré basin.

She specialises in pink river dolphins (bufeos) and Amazonian bird species, but her real expertise is in reading rivers: she understands water levels, current patterns, and where wildlife concentrates in each season better than any GPS map can indicate. In high water she knows which oxbow lakes hold otters; in low water she reads the sand bars where caimans bask and dolphins surface to breathe in predictable patterns.

The pink river dolphin (Inia geoffrensis) is one of only five freshwater dolphin species in the world and the largest — adults reach 2.5m and 185 kg. Unlike marine dolphins, Inia is not a social schooling species; individuals range alone or in loose pairs, using echolocation to navigate murky river water. María can identify individual dolphins by fin shape and skin coloration. She has tracked the same individuals in the Mamoré for seven consecutive years.

On Madidi and Chalalan expeditions, María guides the four-hour motorised canoe journey up the Tuichi River into primary jungle. She identifies bird species by call — more than 200 species acoustically — which is the primary identification method in the cloud forest understory where birds are heard before they are seen. Her night trek protocol in Madidi covers spider monkeys, kinkajous, and the nocturnal species that most guides miss entirely.

María also speaks Portuguese, which gives LOVEBOLIVIA clients direct access to communities along the Bolivian-Brazilian border regions of the Pantanal and the Iténez River — areas where Spanish alone is insufficient and where river navigation requires local trust built over years.