Sendero Macuco
"Twenty minutes from the busiest waterfall on the continent, I stood alone in dripping forest listening to nothing but a woodpecker and my own breathing."
The great trap of Iguazú is that the falls are so overwhelming that you forget the rainforest they sit inside. The walkways to the Garganta del Diablo carry rivers of people in matching ponchos, and they should — the falls deserve every one of those visitors — but after two days of catwalks and selfie sticks I needed to remember that this is a national park with a forest in it, and the Sendero Macuco is where I went to do that. The trailhead is near the visitor centre, easy to miss precisely because almost nobody turns toward it.
A trail almost nobody takes
The Macuco is a flat seven-kilometre out-and-back through dense subtropical Atlantic forest, and the transformation is immediate. Within five minutes the roar of the falls fades and is replaced by the proper sound of the jungle: cicadas in waves, the metronome tick of unseen insects, the occasional crash of something moving in the canopy. We walked for nearly an hour and passed perhaps three other people. After the human tide of the main circuits, the solitude felt almost transgressive, as if I had wandered into a part of the park I was not supposed to find.
The wildlife rewards the patience the crowds never have. We watched a troop of brown capuchin monkeys work through the branches overhead, saw the absurd electric-blue flash of a morpho butterfly the size of my hand, and Lia spotted a toucan that I would have walked straight past, its enormous bill somehow invisible against the leaves until it moved. There were coatis here too, but the relaxed wild kind that ignore you, not the aggressive food-thieving gangs that patrol the cafés near the falls and have learned to unzip a backpack faster than I can.
Salto Arrechea, the secret pool
The trail ends at Salto Arrechea, a slender waterfall maybe twenty metres high that drops into a dark green pool — and this is the part that makes the walk worth it. Unlike the colossal main falls, where swimming would be a creative form of suicide, Arrechea is gentle enough that you are allowed to get in. After the heat of the walk, the water was cold in the way that reorganises your priorities, and I floated on my back looking up at the cascade and the ferns clinging to the wet rock above it, the only sound the falling water and Lia laughing at how undignified my entry into the pool had been.
We had the pool to ourselves for half an hour before a young couple arrived, and even then it felt like a shared secret rather than a crowd. There is a small wooden viewpoint at the top of the falls as well, reached by a short side scramble, but the pool is the prize. I have thought, since, that the Macuco is the single best thing I did at Iguazú, which is an absurd thing to say about a place defined by one of the largest waterfall systems on earth — and yet.
Bring water, insect repellent, and something to swim in. The trail opens in the morning and closes in mid-afternoon to ensure everyone is out before dark, so start early; it gets hot and humid by midday, and the morning is also when the wildlife is most active.