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History La Selva Jungle Lodge was founded in 1984 after Eric Schwartz weary, bleary –eyed, eco-explorer had slogged his way, with his faithful native guides by his side, through six hours of chest high swamp. They then boarded a canoe-like log that had a large papaya-sized hole in it. The naïve navigators presumed mud would patch it, and with tree branches for paddles the three began to wiggle out from and overgrown stream into what is now internationally known as Garzacocha Lake.
I had seen many lakes up to this point but none struck just right and as I was inventing this business, which would later be called ecotourism, my eco- integrity was completely homegrown. So either because some lakes were accessible by motor boat and I imagined that would be annoying or because of their distance from the town of Coca, the jumping off point for any tourism I might eventually have, was too far, I had my criteria all written down in a little black book.
Rounding a bend in the lake and as the canoe sank, I saw my spot. It was a rise , a little hill where the overlay of the vision I had been carrying in my head for the past two years finally fit.
La Selva took two years to dream up, six months to find and another two years to build with 5o men and two horses: one named Bitch and the other named Moan .My wife Maggie took a very active role in it all before and after her difficult pregnancy;. which brought us a son named Mark who will soon join the business.
We started with an Ecuadorian female Architect, A Colombian Engineer and little money. We fired the architect and the engineer and hired a mad Belgian who too, in the end could not grasp our vision - and in the end my wife and I took over the work ourselves. Many of the employees that helped build the lodge still work for us now.
About us
 Image Eric Schwartz, North American, a professional dreamer since childhood spent in suburban Washington, D.C.,dreamt up La Selva while on a visit to his wife’s family in Quito ,Ecuador when with no planning at all joined a local scientific group on a lark to the upper Amazon. Eric and his wife were immediately ambushed by how little these world-renowned scientists knew about the world they had dedicated their lives to study. Was there really a place on earth with more secrets than answers? How could that be? He had to find out.
Eric had traveled far and wide in his work as a “High-Risk” journalist: A gentle story would put him in the first helicopter into Mount St. Helens after it blew. But his specialty ran the geopolitical gamut from sneaking into Siberia with an international group of Eco-activists hell-bent on stopping the Russian illegal commercial whaling operation to chasing the PLO with Bedouin Trackers employed by the Israeli Border Patrol along the Ras Muhamed Line in the Sinai - and of course getting shot at on both those and multiple other occasions. So a kind of adventure travel was not new to him and ecotourism may have been the twinkle in many untrained eyes.
He also wrote for the movies in Hollywood which while profitable and which allowed him to conjure up the dreams that he loved and cherished, ultimately tortured his soul when those dreams left his hands as screenplays to be chopped up – sometimes beyond re not new to him and cognition by the Hollywood lowest common denominator machine.
Suffice it to say that when Eric finally told his mother he was going to build a lodge in the Amazon Jungle, an idea for which there was no precedent, Eric’s mother said: “I’m glad you are finally settling down son.”
 And Eric and his wife who wholeheartedly agreed to partake in what most considered an insane venture did settle, gathering great human beings around that today provide their many visions with other visions joining in a place called La Selva Jungle Lodge. Eric and Maggie are happier than ever in their personal, professional and scientific quest to be in a world where all the answers seem to be still in the future and there is much work left to do.
 Much credit for the current operation of La Selva and the now leader of La Selva’s reinvention, suffused with the original vision of founders, with 18 years of loyal service to the company is CEO Maria Genoveva Salem. She is boldly and dramatically extrapolating from that original vision a vision all her own, new ideas and directions for La Selva guiding La Selva forward with plans for our 2010 goal of a complete makeover of the lodge that as of the start of 2009 is about 60% done.
Ms. Salem is the embodiment of La Selva and Eric and Maggie Schwartz work alongside her toward the same aim: A place that just might change your life.
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