A Naturalist’s Paradise Amid the Clouds

Dictator Juan Vicente Gomez wanted an elegant place away from Venezuela’s hot coast to close deals with English merchants who controlled the country’s biggest port.

So he started building a hotel in a cool cloud forest on a mountain brimming with wildlife near Maracay, this central Venezuelan city from which he ruled.

The general died in 1935, and legend has it that workers walked off the job when they heard the news.

Today, echoes roll down the empty halls and ballrooms of the lifeless, half-finished hotel.

But the forest is as alive as ever with the monkeys, deer, jaguars and exotic birds that make it a nature lover’s paradise.

One-third the size of Rhode Island, Henri Pittier National Park is home to almost as many species of birds as the entire area stretching from Alaska to Mexico’s northern border.

That’s one of the highest concentrations in the world.

“I’ve birded around the world, [and Henri Pittier] is right at the top,” said Wendy Kirschner, an oil geologist from North Dakota who was using her binoculars to marvel at a blue-hooded euphonia. “It’s a world-class birding destination.”

Soaring amid trees up to 200 feet tall are helmeted curassows, blood-eared parakeets, white-tipped quetzals, bearded bluebells and the world’s largest eagle, the harpy.

Visitors also can watch for pumas, ocelets, armadillos, red howler monkeys and 440-pound tapirs that prowl, plod or swing through the park’s 266,266 acres.

In all, the park has half of Venezuela’s 1,200 species, about 3% of the world total.

Travel agents see Henri Pittier as the key to plans to turn Venezuela into a major ecotourism destination.

Bird-watching is one of the world’s fasting-growing hobbies, said Mary Lou Goodwin of the Audubon Society of Venezuela. The United States alone has 68 million bird-watchers, ranging from backyard amateurs to experts armed with expensive binoculars and high-sensitivity tape recorders, she said.

The South American country also boasts snowcapped Andean mountains, Amazon rain forests, one of the world’s longest Caribbean coasts, the world’s highest waterfall and flat-topped mountains that are older than the Swiss Alps.

Henri Pittier starts on arid, cactus-bearing Caribbean beaches and rises 1 1/2 miles up into the Cordillera de la Costa mountains. Its variety of climates is one reason for its variety of birds.

The other is that many birds from as far away as Alaska and Argentina stop off on their annual migrations in a V-shaped dip that cuts into the wall of mountains.

The park’s ecological richness caught the attention early this century of its namesake, a famous Swiss biologist who urged Gomez to preserve the cloud forest as a national park.

It was two years after the dictator’s death, becoming Venezuela’s first national park.

In the 1940s, William Beebe, founder of the New York Zoological Society, moved into the abandoned hotel for several years to conduct research, which he chronicled in his book “High Jungle.”

Beebe wanted to buy the building and turn it into a research center, but the Venezuelan government refused. He left and built a center on the nearby island of Trinidad.

Today, officials are renovating part of the hotel’s first floor as a public education center, but so far have no plans to finish the structure. Goodwin thinks that’s a mistake.

“They could make that into an inn for bird-watchers and nature lovers, and they’d have to make reservations a year in advance to get into that thing,” she said.