Pampas

The Pampas are the fertile lowland grasslands of central Argentina, Uruguay and southernmost Brazil, one of the great temperate grassland systems of the world alongside North America's Great Plains and the Eurasian steppe. Their name comes from a Quechua word for a flat, treeless plain, and the region's deep, rich soils and gentle relief made it, historically, an open grassland ecosystem grazed by native herbivores such as the greater rhea, the pampas deer and the maned wolf. The Pampas are also the cultural home of the gaucho, the region's traditional horseback cattle herder, whose way of life grew directly out of the grassland's vast open range. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the native grassland was extensively converted to cattle ranching and, increasingly, to some of the most productive cropland in the world, making the Pampas today both an ecologically significant temperate grassland and one of the most heavily agricultural landscapes on the South American continent, with intact native grassland now surviving mainly in scattered remnants rather than as a continuous plain.