The Jama-Coaque civilization flourished along this stretch of coast from around 355 B.C. to 1532 A.D., nearly nineteen hundred years. They made ceramics, traded along the Pacific coast, and built a culture that predated the Inca by centuries. Then the Spanish arrived, and the Jama-Coaque ended. Their name survived only on archaeological labels and on this reserve, established in 2007 by the Third Millennium Alliance as a 95-acre patch of private forest along the peaks of the coastal mountain range. Between 2008 and 2011, five separate land purchases expanded it to 586 acres. Today it covers 57 percent of the Upper Camarones River Basin, and it carries the name of the people who knew this forest first.

The reserve climbs from 846 feet along the Camarones River to 2,290 feet at the summit of Cerro Sagrado. In that short vertical distance, the forest transforms. The lower slopes are tropical moist evergreen forest that blends into rainforest. Around 1,900 feet, something extraordinary happens. A nearly constant fog layer hangs along the ridge tops, and the trees change to premontane cloud forest. Moisture from the clouds strips onto leaves and bark, condenses, and drips to the forest floor. This process, called fog drip, is so productive that the cloud forest takes in more than 2,000 millimeters of water annually, almost double what the lowland forest receives. The trees drink the sky, and the forest grows greener the higher you climb.

The reserve sits at one of the planet's most dramatic climate transitions. Offshore, the cold Humboldt Current sweeps up from Antarctica along the Peruvian coast, creating the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth. Just to the north, the warm El Niño current pushes south, feeding the Choco rainforests of Colombia, among the wettest forests on the planet. Jama-Coaque stands between these two systems, and its climate shifts with them. From late December through May, El Niño warmth brings heavy rain. From June or July into mid-January, cooler air and overcast skies dominate. The reserve has watched these patterns compress. Rainfall that once lasted through August now usually ends in May. The cloud forest remains, but the atmosphere around it is changing.

Six species of wild cats move through the Jama-Coaque forest: jaguar, puma, ocelot, oncilla, margay, and jaguarundi. All are endangered. The reserve also shelters two endangered primates, the mantled howler monkey and the white-fronted capuchin. Other threatened mammals, such as the tayra, the three-toed sloth, the western agouti, and the spotted paca, use the corridor between lowland and cloud forest for migration and survival. In 2009, herpetologist Paul S. Hamilton walked through the cloud forest and found two species of frog that science had never described before. Amphibians this small and specialized exist only in places like this, where the climate has stayed wet and stable long enough for evolution to produce something found nowhere else.

Conservation International has designated the Tumbes-Choco-Magdalena corridor, which includes Jama-Coaque, as one of the world's biodiversity hotspots. The Bamboo House Research Station sits inside the reserve, three kilometers inland from the small agricultural community of Camarones, roughly equidistant from the coastal towns of Jama and Pedernales. Scientists, students, and conservation staff work from the Bamboo House year-round, monitoring wildlife, restoring degraded patches, and tracking how the cloud forest responds to a shifting climate. The reserve exists because one non-profit, Third Millennium Alliance, decided in 2007 that 95 acres was worth buying and then kept buying. Two percent of coastal Ecuador's forest remains, and this is one of the pieces that still holds.