The Highest Tree House in the Amazon

In 2023, conservationists and carpenters converged on Peru to build luxury accommodations in the rain-forest canopy.

Every day, empty logging trucks rumble into Puerto Lucerna, a small outpost on Peru’s Las Piedras River, which snakes through the lush Amazon rain forest. There, workers load them up with pyramids of freshly cut logs—cedar, quinilla, and, most important, ironwoods, which are prized for their hardness and rich color. Hundreds of thousands of ironwood trees flowed out of the Peruvian Amazon between 2000 and 2020, many of them illegally logged and extracted from this region, Madre de Dios. A few miles from the port, a narrow line of trees towers over a deforested landscape—a grim portent of what could happen to the rest of the forest.

One morning in May, 2023, a lone truck, piled high with wooden beams, did something curious: it carried its cargo into Puerto Lucerna, against the usual flow of timber. The beams were headed for a remote pair of intertwined trees that measured a hundred and thirty feet tall. There, a group of conservationists from Tamandua Expeditions planned to erect the highest tree house in the Amazon.

On the banks of the river, laborers loaded the wood onto small motorized canoes called peque peques. One boat sank before it even pushed off, but workers managed to recover the wood, and they successfully ferried it forty minutes upriver. Rollin Yvana, an accountant by training who had struggled to find well-paid work in Puerto Maldonado, the regional capital, helped to load it onto a cart. “The path was disastrous,” he recalled. Pushing it through the mud made him want to quit and go back to the city. But he also wanted to see the great tree house finished.

When Yvana and his colleagues reached the intertwined trees, they greeted a global collective of carpenters, arborists, and tree-house builders, known as the Tree House Community. Philipp Klingspies, the group’s founder, was orchestrating the ascent of eighty massive wooden beams, which would support a spiral staircase attached to the trees. Sweaty workers used a pulley to lift the beams one by one. Often, butterflies and wasps hitched a ride to the top; on some days, crew members were stung a dozen times.

When the structure reached about thirty feet, less than a third of its eventual height, it swayed dangerously and needed to be tied to the trees with a thick steel cable, cushioned against the bark with wood blocks and recycled rubber tires. Finally, the staircase was finished. Connected with some eight hundred bolts, it disappeared into the center of the treetop. Now the main platform of the house could be built.

Klingspies and Sava Burow, an expert arborist from Berlin, spent a day in the trees, slicing away branches to offset part of the weight that the house would add. Burow, who once built sets for night clubs, told me that his job was to make “necessary cuts to achieve a stable coexistence of tree house and tree.” Sap spilled out of the stumps, like blood clotting to heal a wound.

Klingspies and Burow had identified a problem with a colossal limb that was supposed to be a main support for the tree house: almost a third of the wood was hollow and soft with fungus. “We knew it was serious,” Klingspies said. He told the leaders of Tamandua that, in theory, they could stick to the original design. “It would definitely be good for maybe five, ten years,” he reasoned, but “that branch doesn’t seem to want to accept so much for that much longer.” In the worst case, the fungus could hollow out the crucial branch until it cracked…

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