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Dr. Daan Vreugdenhil: 50 Battling for Nature Conservation

In 1974, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations partnered with the Ecuadorian Forest Service on the “FORSEFOR” project. Their mission was to propose a national system of protected areas for Ecuador (SNAP), where only the Galapagos National Park existed at the time. The study was lead by Alan Putney, MSc from the USA. IR. Daan Vreugdenhil from the Netherlands (now Dr.), and a team from Ecuador’s Departmento de Áreas Protegidas y Vida Silvestre, DAPVS, including Flavio Coello (now Dr.). Putney studied the Andes and the coast, while Vreugdenhil studied the “Oriente” (Ecuadorian Amazon) — a region that was then 90% virgin and highly impenetrable. To survey the area and conduct informal hearings with local tribes, Vreugdenhil hired aviation services with using 6-seater Helio STOL airplanes from two missionary groups: the Summer Linguistic Institute (ILV) based in Limoncocha (which served indigenous communities in the North ) and another group at the Shell Mera airport in Pastaza servicing tribal communities in the central Oriente. Where Vreugdenhil could not travel by motorized canoe or jungle airplane, he walked through the jungle guided by local indigenous people on National Geograpic like expeditions. In early 1975, Vreugdenhil launched his first expedition into the Amazon lowlands. At the time, the road from Quito ended at the oil town of Lago Agrio, requiring all further travel to be by river. Navigating down the Aguarico River and up the Cuyabeno River, he discovered a large, beautiful lake that he named Cuyabeno Lake (now locally wrongly refered to as Laguna Grande). Overwhelmed by its beauty, he observed that the lake was surrounded by expansive swamps dominated by Macrolobium trees, which resembled giant bonsai trees. His first day ended with a spectacular yellow and orange sunset — a feature that would later become a famous branding element for Lake Cuyabeno. He spent his first night camping on a small island hill along the swamp shore. That night he had no idea that he would continue to visit that beautiful little island for the next four decades of his professional career, as it eventually became the site of the Cuyabeno Lodge.

Parks Man Dr. Daan Vreugdenhil proposed to protect the Cuyabeno watershed in 1976. In 1979 it was gazetted as the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve of 155,000 ha. In 1983 he proposed successfully to extend it to the border with Peru, thus growing in to 590,112 hectares. In order to generate economic benefits to the reserve, he sold his house and with the proceeds he built the experimental ecolodge, the Cuyabeno Lodge on that little island in the Cuyabeno Lake.

In his 1976 report, “Inventario de las Áreas Silvestres de la Cuenca Amazónica Ecuatoriana,” Daan Vreugdenhil recommended protecting nine areas, which included the 155,000-hectare Cuyabeno River watershed. He also proposed a larger area within the Huaorani territory — covering the entire Tiputini River watershed — to establish Yasuní National Park. Vreugdenhil’s original tecnical proposal aimed to include the complete Tiputini watershed to protect the park from external pollution. However, doing so would have outlawed oil drilling in highly lucrative zones. To keep the northern part of the ITT Block (Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini) and surrounding areas legally open for extraction, the government altered the park’s boundaries to exclude the full upper and middle watershed. Additionally, Vreugdenhil proposed dedicated territories for indigenous tribes. He anticipated that they would otherwise lose their lands to Andean smallholders, who were using newly constructed pipeline routes to clear the rainforest and claim ownership. This report served as the foundation for the Amazonian zones detailed in the 1976 FAO/UNDP document, “Estrategia Preliminar para la Conservación de Áreas Silvestres Sobresalientes del Ecuador.”

His report served as the foundation for the Amazonian areas detailed in the 1976 FAO/UNDP document “Estrategia Preliminar para la Conservación de Áreas Silvestres Sobresalientes del Ecuador.” Spearheaded by lead author Alen Putney and co-authored by Daan Vreugdenhil alongside Ecuadorian colleagues, this strategy proposed protecting roughly 40 areas, which together accounted for about 7.8% of Ecuador’s mainland. By 1979, the government officially decreed the protection for the majority of these areas under different management designations. The approximately 155,000-hectare Cuyabeno watershed was established as the Reserva de Producción Faunística Cuyabeno. In contrast to modern assumptions, the original intent behind this specific designation was not to protect the local wildlife, but rather to allow hunting. Alen Putney wanted to incorporate as many land management categories as possible into the newly designed protected areas network, so Cuyabeno was modeled after the experimental hunting reserves common in Africa. Fortunately, the government never fully implemented the hunting reserve category, and from its inception, the reserve was managed as a protected area similar to a national park. At the beginning of the 1980s, a dirt road was built from Lago Agrio to the border town of San Miguel. It crossed the reserve at a location that became popularly known as “el Puente” (the bridge). Smallholders, known locally as “colonos,” immediately followed this road and illegally occupied the lands along the road, including parts inside the reserve. While the exact year is uncertain, by around 1982, the director of Cuyabeno at the time, Flavio Coello, contacted his friend Daan Vreugdenhil at his home in the Netherlands to ask for advice on how to handle these illegal invasions. Vreugdenhil, who was working for the Dutch government’s Rijkswaterstaat, took a one-month leave of absence without pay and bought a plane ticket with his own money. Together, the two friends assessed the situation and made three specific recommendations:
  • 1. Remove the invaded lands along the road. They determined it would be too difficult to manage a nature reserve with a large population living inside it.
  • 2. Expand the reserve eastward to the border with Peru. Vreugdenhil rented an airplane with his own money to conduct a reconnaissance flight, flying a cross-pattern across the entire region from the Cuyabeno watershed to the Peruvian border. This flight confirmed that no people were living between the existing eastern boundary of the reserve and the border with Peru. Based on this, they proposed protecting the entire area along both sides of the Aguarico River up to the Colombian border, and eastward all the way to the Lagartocoche border river. This expansion was executed in 1987 via Interministerial Agreement No. 328, quadrupling the Cuyabeno wildlife reserve from 155,000 hectares to 590,112 hectares (with minor corrections later made in 1991 and 1993).
  • 3. Build a lodge at the Cuyabeno Lake. They noted that the government could not justify protecting such a massive territory without generating economic benefits. Because the lake was the primary attraction, visitors needed to be able to access it, which was logistically impossible to do in a single day.
Constructing a lodge proved to be a complicated task. Although the government favored a lodge at the lake, it lacked the legal framework to build it itself. Daan approached multiple tourism agencies in Quito to persuade them to apply for a concession and invest in the building process, but none were interested. He then asked the director of DAPVS, Ing. Arturo Ponce, if he would support a lodge funded by Dutch capital, and Ponce agreed. However, Daan was unable to secure any investors in the Netherlands either. Determined to find a solution, Daan and his wife, Eveline, decided to sell their own house to finance the project. They established the tourism corporation Neotropic Turis Cia. Ltda (NT) and received a concession to run the venue, which they named “Cuyabeno Lodge” (inspired by Yellowstone Lodge). To market the destination, the Vreugdenhils formed a Dutch company called “Monte Alegre”—the Spanish translation of their surname—and brought their first group of 16 Dutch tourists in 1986. Shortly after Monte Alegre began these marketing efforts, a German travel agency named Naturstudienreisen began purchasing an average of two groups per month for vacation packages combining the Galapagos, the Andes, and Cuyabeno. All proceeds from these tours were funneled directly into building the lodge, as the couple did not take any income for themselves so as to realize their dream. Conversely, the Ecuadorian shareholders, Cecilia Hernández and her Dutch husband Dr. Tjitte de Vries, did not contribute financially to the investment. Instead, they were paid for their services — Cecilia for managing Neotropic Turis and Tjitte for tour guiding — and they received 33% of NT’s shares for free without investing in the lodge. Years later, Cecilia’s brother, the late General Luis Hernández, also received a 17% stake without investing, and he soon became the general manager. As the creators of the very first ecolodge in Cuyabeno — and in all of mainland Ecuador — the Vreugdenhils secured the prime location: that beautiful island hill alongside the Lake Cuyabeno swamp where Daan had spent his first night in 1975. By 2013, Cecilia Hernández sold her shares to Eveline Vreugdenhil, giving Eveline an 83% stake and establishing the Vreugdenhils as the primary owners of the lodge.
What distinguishes Cuyabeno from other Amazonian destinations is its unique landscape. Situated close to the Andes, the reserve features an unmatched network of blackwater lakes, seasonally flooded forests, and narrow, navigable rivers and creeks. In fact, it is the only nature reserve with these specific geographical traits across all Andean-Amazonian countries. This environment makes it perfectly suited for navigating narrow waterways in motorized canoes.
Daan did not just work in Ecuador. In fact, he dedicated his entire professional life to conservation of nature and national parks worldwide. See also: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drdaanvreugdenhil/
Having started his career in 1969 as a project officer of the IYF (now YEE); he dedicated his life to the conservation of nature and now is among the world’s most experienced conservation ecologists. Having defended his PhD thesis on portected areas systems he is among the leading experts worldwide on protected areas management. Besides English, Daan speaks, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese; he has traveled to 90 countries, many in the context of his work in service of conservation. He has organized and lead National Geographic like scientific expeditions with large teams of scientists into jungles in South America and Africa where no western explorers had gone before. His slogan: CONSERVATIONISTS NEVER GIVE UP!

A practical planner and problem solver, with a PhD from Wageningen University, his career of half a century  includes working for the FAO of the United Nations, The Dutch equivalent of the USA Corps of Engineers, Rijkswaterstaat, Haskoning, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the World Bank, the German Development Organization (GIZ), the USA Development Agency, (USAID), and a variety of other prestigious international institutions. Read about his holistic conservation approach.

As national parks conservation expert, Daan has worried about national parks underutilized. Politicians are interested in economic benefits to support conservation . He decided to dedicate the last years of his professional life to the development of national parks tours. After all, with his knowledge of national parks, his broad travel experience and his 30+ years of experience in the ecotourism business, who has more experience in developing great tours to national parks? Read more about his national parks tours in many countries of the world: https://nationalparks-worldwide.com.

Without politicas interest and support nature reserves and parks may be invaded and destroyed.
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