Restoring Ecosystems, Reconnecting Communities: Freyja Joins Forces with AMBÁ in Eastern Uruguay
In eastern Uruguay, hill ranges, waterways, grasslands, and native woodlands meet to form one of the country’s most important and interconnected natural systems. It is a landscape vital for biodiversity, for water, and for the communities that live and work within the region.
For over a decade, the NGO AMBÁ has worked here to advance a distinctive approach to conservation called nature production – a model that treats ecosystem restoration and community well-being as inseparable, building regenerative economies like ecotourism, pasture cattle ranching, and agroecological production that depend on healthy ecosystems, rather than deplete them.
Freyja Foundation is proud to announce our partnership with AMBÁ, because we believe this is the kind of conservation that lasts: one that combines ecological protection, social legitimacy, institutional capacity, and real opportunities for local communities. Together, we are entering a new phase of scaling up these efforts, deepening their impact across Uruguay and the region.
A biologically rich and interconnected landscape
Our work with AMBÁ will focus on the departments of Maldonado, Lavalleja, and Rocha, where some of Uruguay's most important natural systems converge. The region holds a key water network with the potential to supply drinking water to more than 60% of the country’s population. Native forests are also unusually abundant in this region: while the national average is around 5%, areas within the landscape reach approximately 12% of forest cover.
The region’s mosaic of grasslands, native forests, and waterways supports a rich diversity of wildlife and provides habitat for priority species for conservation, including yerba mate, the red-tailed coral snake, margays, capybaras and pampas deer. Likewise, this area sits at the southern edge of the Atlantic Forest – one of the world's top five biodiversity hotspots and most threatened biomes. Thus, protecting this area directly strengthens a binational conservation corridor with Brazil of global significance.
Our work with AMBÁ will focus on 3 of Uruguay’s easternmost provinces: Maldonado, Lavalleja, and Rocha
A New Phase of Collaboration
Since 2021, AMBÁ has led initiatives focused on protecting the region’s unique natural heritage while promoting development models rooted in nature conservation and local identity. Beginning in Maldonado and Rocha and later expanding to Lavalleja, their work has built technical capacity, engaged local stakeholders in land-use planning, and helped secure stronger regulations on the highest-impact activities in the region – industrial forestry, large-scale mining, oil exploration, and the clearing of native woodlands.
Building on that foundation, AMBÁ and Freyja will work together to strengthen conservation and economic development across eastern Uruguay, supporting nature-based tourism opportunities and launching a 3,000-hectare regenerative livestock pilot aimed at conserving native grasslands and promoting holistic management practices.
Through this partnership, Freyja is committing to a vision of conservation that grows with the territory: one that safeguards critical ecosystems, strengthens the communities that inhabit them, and inspires learnings across Uruguay and beyond.
