But from the air, the damage to the jungle also becomes more obvious. We flew over charred hectares of burnt trees, huge piles of felled logs and, most memorably of all, vast (and mostly illegal) gold mines.

Before the flight, I might have pictured a gold mine as a surreptitious doorway carved into a mountainside. The largest of the ones I saw, known as Guacamayo, was more like a pustulent wound—a gash of festering yellows and whites amid the lush greens of the jungle. It even seeped into the nearby river and jaundiced its water. It was a nauseating sight, and one utterly disconnected from the glistening metal that gets fashioned into jewellery and ornaments.

The Madre de Dios region