Llanganates National Park

Llanganates National Park () is a place in Ecuador.  It is a place for plants, animals, and other living things to live. It is in the Cotopaxi Province, Napo Province, Pastaza Province, and Tungurahua Province. A mountain called Cerro Hermoso ("beautiful mountain") is in the park. It is  high. Hikers like to come to the park to climb it. The park is famous for the Treasure of the Llanganatis.

Visitors come to the park from towns, for example Salcedo, Patate, Pillaro, Baños, and Rio Verde.

Ecology
The park has two different places in it. The west part of the park is in the Andes mountains. It is a special kind of forest called a páramo. This is much higher up than the east part of the park.  There are high mountains and high valleys. Only a few plants and animals live there, for example South American camelids like vicuñas, llamas, and alpacas.

The east part of the park has mountain forests with many different kinds of plants and animals. It is hard to get to this place. Human beings can only go by walking, not with cars or planes. There are many rivers. Scientists found many species of plants that no scientist had written about before, for example many Andean Magnolia plants.

Exploration
In 2013, people from Ecuador, Britain, France, and America found and dug up a 260 ft tall by 260 ft wide stone thing. They saw it had hundreds of two-ton stone blocks in it. Scholars think there could be more things like this nearby.  They found the stone thing 20 miles from the town of Baños, but it takes eight hours to get there because there are mountains and jungles in the way. They found it 8,500 ft above sea level in cloud forest.

 References 

 Other websites 
 www.murcielagoblanco.com / List of mammals in the Llanganates National Park (Spanish)
 www.birdlife.org / List of birds in the Llanganates National Park (Spanish / English)
 / Attractions of the Llanganates (Spanish) 

Category:National parks in Ecuador
Category:Cotopaxi Province
Category:Napo Province
Category:Pastaza Province
Category:Tungurahua Province