Already, an estimated one half of the country's forests have been cleared. In the 1980s, the U.S. press covered the country's role as a staging area for U.S. troops and Nicaraguan Contra rebels and the flood of war-weary Salvadoran and Nicaraguan refugees that poured across its borders. These days, peaceful but poor Honduras garners little international press. A Land of Diversity Biologically speaking, Honduras is a natural melting pot where North meets South, dry meets wet, and high meets low. The variety of habitats in the country, and even in individual parks, is stunning.
Tropical rainforests blanket lowlands mainly in the east and north.
The shorelines along the North Coast and southern Gulf of Fonseca are dotted with mangrove swamps. Pines, nearing their southern limit in the Western Hemisphere, cover inland mountains, many of which are capped with misty cloud forest. In some dry pockets, rare tropical dry forest prevails. Recognizing that the country's population was quickly growing, and that deforestation was accelerating, the Honduran government established wildlife protection laws and set up a national park system in the early 1980s. Since then, the system has spread to cover 107 areas, including national parks, biological reserves, cultural heritage sites, and the remote Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, which, at 1.3 million acres, is the size of Florida's Everglades National Park.