The short answer: a husband and wife replanted a ruined family farm, and the forest came back. Starting in 1998, the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado and his wife, Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado, turned Bulcão Farm in Aimorés, Minas Gerais, from bare, eroded pasture into a protected stretch of regrowing Atlantic Forest. By January 2019 their nonprofit, Instituto Terra, reported more than 2.5 million native seedlings planted there, drawn from nearly 300 species. Springs that had dried up began to run again, and the birds and mammals followed.
The pair of photos above, labelled 2001 and 2019, is the reason the story travels so widely online. It deserves the attention. It also deserves a fuller telling than "a man planted some trees".
A homecoming to a land stripped bare
Salgado was born in Aimorés in 1944 and grew up on the family farm when the hills were still wooded. Decades of logging and cattle ranching changed that. When the couple took over the property in the 1990s, the slopes had been grazed down to dry grass and exposed soil, and much of the wildlife he remembered was gone.
The timing mattered to him personally. In many interviews over the years, Salgado said he came home exhausted and disheartened after long assignments documenting war and mass displacement, including the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda. It was Lélia, by his account, who proposed the remedy: plant the forest again. He often credited her with the idea, and the institute was a joint project from the start, as were their agency, Amazonas Images, and much of their book work.
From cattle pasture to protected reserve
Instituto Terra was founded in 1998. That October, Bulcão Farm was recognised as a private natural heritage reserve, known in Brazil as an RPPN. According to the institute, it was the first such reserve created on degraded land with a commitment to replant it, rather than on land that was already wild. Accounts of its size vary from about 1,500 to 1,700 acres (roughly 600 to 700 hectares).
The aerial sequence above, from 2000, 2006 and 2012, shows the farm's outline gradually filling in with green. The first seedlings went into the ground in late 1999, with local schoolchildren among the planters. Planting has since followed Brazil's rainy season, from about November to January, when young trees have the best chance of rooting before the dry months.
Why the Atlantic Forest, specifically
This project is often shared as "rainforest" or even "Amazon" regrowth, but it belongs to a different and more threatened biome. The Atlantic Forest, or Mata Atlântica, once ran along most of Brazil's coast and inland into states such as Minas Gerais. Centuries of sugar, coffee, cattle and city growth have left only a fraction of it standing, in scattered patches. That is why a single reconnected hillside here carries more conservation weight than its size suggests.
What came back with the trees
The collage above gives a sense of the animals now recorded on the reserve. Instituto Terra lists 173 bird species, 33 mammals, 16 reptiles and 15 amphibians. Among them are an ocelot family and two threatened parrots: the red-browed amazon and the vinaceous-breasted amazon. None of them were reintroduced; they arrived on their own once there was shelter and food.
Water was the other quiet return. Forest cover slows rain, lets it soak into the ground and feeds springs instead of washing soil into rivers. As the canopy closed, springs on the property began to flow again. That experience shaped one of the institute's larger programmes, Olhos D'Água, which works on protecting springs across the Rio Doce basin, a region estimated to hold more than 370,000 of them.
The unglamorous work behind the photos
Lélia and Sebastião Salgado are pictured above beside the institute's nursery beds. The nursery is the engine of the whole effort: the institute describes it as able to grow around a million seedlings a year, one of the largest in Brazil, and most of its output now goes to restoration projects beyond the farm.
Before-and-after images compress years of labour into a single swipe. In practice, crews have to clear invasive grass, dig pits, plant, water and then return to replace seedlings that die. Field teams like the one above did that, season after season.
Planting in mixed groups, as seen here, matters. Restoration ecologists generally favour a blend of fast-growing pioneer trees, which shade the ground quickly, and slower species that form the mature canopy later. The institute says it has used close to 300 native species, which gives the regrowth a far better chance of becoming real forest rather than a plantation.
The planting tool in the right-hand frame makes a narrow hole quickly, which helps teams put in thousands of seedlings during the short rainy window. Since 2015 the reserve has also been in an "enrichment" phase, adding species that need the shade of an existing canopy to thrive.
Each seedling is pressed into hand-prepared soil. On worn-out pasture, that soil is often compacted and poor in nutrients, so early survival depends on careful handling and good timing more than on raw numbers.
Watering a newly planted seedling, as shown here, is often the difference between a statistic and a living tree. Planting totals are a useful milestone, but survival and growth are what eventually make a forest.
Education and the wider Rio Doce valley
From early on, the couple wanted the farm to be a teaching site as well as a reserve. In 2002 the institute opened an environmental education and restoration centre, and its programmes have since reached schools, young people and farmers across the Rio Doce valley, including later efforts aimed at helping rural landowners restore their own land. The institute's current site describes more than 1,570 children and young people from the basin taking part in its education work, plus programmes with names such as Terrinhas, Terra Jovens, Terra Doce and Refloresta.
The figures in this story come from different dates, so they can look inconsistent. Two million trees, 2.5 million seedlings and "over 3 million" are milestones from different years, and the institute now speaks of about 3.5 million trees across all of its work, not only on Bulcão Farm.
What other restoration projects can learn
- Protect the land legally first. RPPN status meant the replanted forest could not simply be cleared again.
- Grow your own seedlings. A local nursery supplies native species suited to the soil and climate.
- Plan for years, not days. Replacement planting, weeding and fire protection continue long after the photo opportunity.
- Bring neighbours in. Springs, rivers and wildlife cross property lines, so long-term success depends on the surrounding farms too.
It is also fair to be cautious. Not every degraded site will recover as well, and one restored farm cannot replace the protection of forest that still stands. But the Salgados showed, on a real and measurable piece of land, that recovery is possible when people commit to it for decades.
A legacy beyond photography
Sebastião Salgado died in Paris on 23 May 2025, at the age of 81. He is best known for monumental black-and-white series such as Workers, Exodus, Genesis and Amazônia, and for the 2014 documentary The Salt of the Earth, co-directed by Wim Wenders and the couple's son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. Many of those books were conceived and edited with Lélia. The forest at Aimorés, which they built together and which continues under Instituto Terra, may prove to be the most lasting work of all.
Sources: Instituto Terra on Google Arts & Culture: It is possible to recover the Atlantic Forest; Instituto Terra (official site); Wikipedia: Sebastião Salgado; Blind Magazine, May 2025: Sebastião Salgado dies at 81. Photos: Instituto Terra and Sebastião Salgado. Earlier reporting: The Guardian (2015).
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