Michel Roggo's Image

This was Michel’s second visit to the Pantanal, on a journey to reveal the undervalued beauty of freshwater. ‘I’ve never seen any place on earth with such diversity of forms, shapes and colours,’ says Michel. This scene, ‘like an impressionist painting’, captured the spirit of the place. ‘The longer you look, the more you see, and that is the Pantanal.’

This tiny unnamed tributary is part of the vast Pantanal – the world’s largest tropical wetland. A sprawling patchwork of marshes, its annual cycle of floods nurtures a dazzling variety of life. Water hyacinths have received bad press as invasive weeds, but in its native habitat this species forms the architecture of a ‘freshwater Eden’.