The adventure begins at the port of Puerto Maldonado.

The boatswain packs cans of petrol onto his wooden boat, then boxes of groceries, pots, plates, rucksacks, and finally a load of thin camouflage-patterned mattresses.

Chef Roy Palomino brings lunch, mango rice wrapped in banana leaves.

The hostess Sofia Rubio sits at the bow and gives the signal to depart.

With 14 people and packed to the brim, the boat chugs down the Madre de Dios river at around 20 kilometers per hour.

It is already dusk when it turns into a small tributary.

After countless meanders in the river and in total darkness, the boatswain heads for an embankment.

Behind it lies the destination: a clearing in the middle of Sofia Rubio's Brazil nut concession.

In contrast to the Central European cultural forest, nothing is still and quiet in the Amazonian rainforest, but it rustles, chirps, scrapes, hums and drips from all sides.

Parrots fly up screeching, lizards rustle in leaves, branches snap under the weight of years, ants dig their underground kingdoms.

The trees grow so high in the sky that daylight barely reaches the ground.

Tonka bean trees, Mauritia palms, West Indian cedars, tree stranglers and dripping ferns shimmer in all shades of brown and green.

The air is warm and humid and musty.

You can smell how life passes by here and is constantly being reborn.

Royal bees need the rainforest

Sofia Rubio is a jungle child.

When she strides out in rubber boots and uses a machete to clear her way through the forest or wipes the omnipresent mosquitoes from her face with a nonchalant gesture, small, tough and always smiling, she never seems to have done anything else.

Even as a small child, she accompanied her parents, who both worked in environmental protection, on their tours through the forest, she slept on rocking boats and washed in the stream before she even knew a shower.

At 18 she went to Lima to study biology, at 21 she took over her mother's Brazil nut concession and founded "Shiwi", a small business for the processing and sale of Brazil nuts.

Now she is standing in front of one of “her” Brazil nut trees.

Brazil nut trees are up to 40 meters high, up to a thousand years old and stand sporadically between other trees in the forest.

Attempts to grow them in plantations have failed because the bees that pollinate them need a pristine rainforest environment.

They shed their fruit, the Brazil nuts, in rock-hard, coconut-like capsules.

Only experienced Brazil nut collectors can open them with a few blows of their machete.

And only the agoutis have such sharp teeth that they can gnaw a hole in the thick shell.

Agutis are common rodents in the Amazon;

they look like a cross between a rabbit and a squirrel.

Legend has it that without them there would be no Brazil nut trees.

Because they bury the nuts they don't eat as a store, but then forget

where they buried him.

Until years later, a new Brazil nut tree reveals the former storage location.

The nuts and the gold

Madre de Dios has always been known for its Brazil nuts in Peru.

But since gold prices have soared, the Amazon region of southeastern Peru has become notorious for another commodity.

Hosts of illegal gold prospectors dig up the banks of the rivers and wash out the gold particles with mercury.

Where the gold diggers were, they leave a lunar landscape.

The outrage on the Amazon rainforest corresponds to the growing global demand for gold and represents the exploitation of the entire area.

Be it gold, tropical timber, soy or coca: they are all destroying the fragile ecosystem.

On the other hand, those who live off and with the forest without destroying it will generally not make any big profits.

Because the true, harmless treasures of the rainforest, such as Brazil nuts, are only known to a few.