From the prairie of Patagonia to the wilds of the Carpathian Mountains, and England’s famed Knepp estate, here are eight of the most successful rewilding projects around the world you can visit
If you’ve ever walked through a sitka spruce monoculture forest, you’ll know the eerie silence that hangs over them. The closed canopy and lack of plant diversity means the comforting sounds of birds chirping and insects buzzing are often entirely absent.
To a degree, most natural places on earth could be busier with wildlife, particularly regions that have seen intensive monoculture farming. This is where rewilding steps in: the process of rejuvenating a degraded natural environment back to a healthy wild state, undoing the damage from human interference, and boosting the density and variety of plant, bird, insect and animal life. It is an urgent mission, acknowledged in June 2024 when the EU passed a law committing the bloc to restore 20 per cent of its land and sea by the end of the 2020s – an ambitious and necessary target to mitigate climate catastrophe. Improving the biodiversity present in a landscape is particularly important for creating hardy environments that can withstand the worst effects of climate breakdown, and is a key strategy for limiting global heating, as biodiverse environments act as more effective carbon stores.
Rewilding is important business for local communities and for the travel industry as a whole, too. Otherwise ignored destinations such as the Côa Valley in Portugal are developing wildlife tourism alongside their rewilding efforts to bring travellers to the neglected region. Remote stays in lodges and huts in the midst of a regenerating wilderness, with the chance for adventure travel experiences like hiking, biking or fishing in a flourishing landscape, are the new draws bringing travellers to these formerly neglected destinations. The revenue stream these visitors bring can then feed back into funding the conservation schemes, helping to further the rewilding efforts.
We have curated eight of the most successful rewilding projects in the world, ranging in size from enormous national parks to individual farms – such as Knepp’s rewilding programme in West Sussex, UK. Many of these projects have been ongoing for 20 years or more, which is enough time to begin identifying the positive impact they are having, but not enough to reveal the full transformative effect they will have. These processes have cascading effects for the whole ecosystem that will continue to be felt for hundreds of years. Here are the most successful rewilding projects in the world, and how you can visit them.
