Five Indigenous people wearing traditional dress and ornamental headdresses sit together in front of a bamboo structure.

Projects with Shintuya

For conservation and the community

Protecting together – acting together

For decades now, Chris Kirkby, CEO of Wilderness International Peru, and the people of Shintuya have shared a close friendship. When we heard that a unique and highly endangered piece of land was up for sale right next to Shintuya, we didn’t hesitate to establish our new conservation area: the Secret Forest Manu.

What's important to us is this: we do not come to Shintuya to tell them how nature conservation should work. Rather, we see ourselves as learners and companions. We have responded to the community’s explicit invitation to work with them to protect this unique forest and to support them in preserving and reclaiming their ancestral territory and culture for future generations.

Who are ‘the Shintuya’?

In fact, ‘Shintuya’ originally refers not to a group of people, but to a place: an indigenous conservation area in the province Manu, bordering Manu National Park, where people of different origins live together. ‘The Shintuya’ are therefore not a tribe in their own right, but a community of various indigenous tribes. Nevertheless, we occasionally refer to ‘the Shintya’ – as does the community itself.

Indigenous person wearing red headband and traditional beaded necklaces, standing before a welcome sign in Spanish.

Our new protected area, the Secret Forest Manu, borders directly on Shintuya. Together, we want to create a wildlife corridor linking various protected areas in the region.

Map showing Peru's protected areas including Manu National Park, indigenous communities, and the Secret Forest MANU corridor highlighted in yellow. — Our new protected area, the Secret Forest Manu, borders directly on Shintuya. Together, we want to create a wildlife corridor linking various protected areas in the region.

Paradise in Peril

The province of Manu, in which Shintuya and our new conservation area adjacent to it are situated, is a paradise of biodiversity; however, the forests surrounding Shintuya have long been under threat from commercial interests. There have been, and continue to be, repeated attempts to develop the region for the extraction of raw materials.

Shintuya and our conservation area lie within a concession that, in theory, allows international companies to extract oil and gas right there. Together with the indigenous communities living there, we are determined to prevent this at all costs.

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With Wilderness International, the Shintuya now have an international partner at their side. Together, we aim to give the Shintuya’s voice greater international influence and to strengthen the protection of their territory in the long term.

Map showing protected area in green and Hydrocarbon Exploration Lot MD-XP-001 in brown/orange with red arrow indicator. — With Wilderness International, the Shintuya now have an international partner at their side. Together, we aim to give the Shintuya’s voice greater international influence and to strengthen the protection of their territory in the long term.

Hannah Emde accompanied us to Manu in April 2026 to explore our new conservation area. Her encounter with Victoria from the Shintuya people left a lasting impression.

The "Nacion Harakbut"

Under the name Nacion Harakbut, a number of indigenous communities, including Shintuya, have come together to form an autonomous territorial government.

The Harakbut people, after whom the group is named, have lived in Manu for a long time, and their history is closely intertwined with their ancestral territory, their identity, their self-governance and their spiritual relationship with nature. With the arrival of outsiders in this region at the end of the 19th century, during the rubber boom, a new era of invasion, violence and territorial loss began for the Harakbut.

The main objectives of the still relatively young Nacion Harakbut are therefore to ensure the self-governance and self-determination of the Harakbut people, to defend their cultural identity, to protect their existing legally recognised territories, and to reclaim their ancestral lands.

For many years, the Harakbut Nation has been fighting against a multitude of problems, ranging from the economic exploitation of their territories through oil and gas extraction, to gold mining operators, loggers, land squatters from outside the region (not indigenous peoples of the Amazon, but from the Peruvian Andes) and papaya monoculture farmers, right through to lobbying the government for the provision of basic services. The main allies of these communities are NGOs such as Wilderness International.

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