The Wild Andes

In the Northern Andes, rising mountains and erupting volcanoes have produced a stunning variety of life. Boasting poison frogs, legless amphibians, high-flying monkeys, the continent’s only bears, and the world’s last tropical glaciers, the Northern Andes are unlike anywhere else on Earth.

Against a dramatic backdrop of super-heated geysers, arid grasslands and snow-capped volcanos, the fortunes of a newborn vicuna foal, and that of a flamingo colony, unfold. This is the breath-taking story of how animals on the high, central Andean plains have adapted to a world fired by volcanic heat and pinched by thirst and thin air.

Surrounded by mighty glaciers and fortress-like granite peaks, battered by Antarctic winds and icy rain, a female puma tries to raise its family and tracks its prey across the rugged landscape of Patagonia. Whereas in the Valdivian rainforest Darwin beetles fight for a mate. Constant upheaval and explosive change tests life in the Southern Andes at any moment. It is even more astonishing then, that there exist trees here, that outlasted the dinosaurs and are even older than the mountains themselves.