Head of Rewilding
Raquel Filgueiras was born in 1972 in a small coastal village in northern Portugal. Like many other Portuguese, the ocean and her curiosity lead her to a career that now spans three continents and numerous countries.
Having started on the plains of southern Portugal, she quickly switched her attention to Africa, moving there to help the IUCN develop a tourism plan for the Parque Nacional do Rio Cacheu in Guinea-Bissau. Forced to leave the country by civil war, she eventually joined The Nature Conservancy in the eastern Caribbean, where she led the Grenadines Parks in Peril programme, setting up a network of marine protected areas between Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The call of Africa was still strong, however. After a decade away, she returned, this time to Mozambique to work with communities living around Gorongosa National Park, one of the first privately run protected areas in Africa.
Raquel believes strongly in the innovative power of the private sector as a force that can bring about positive change. This is why, in 2010, she joined the African Parks Network to manage Liuwa Plain National Park, a remote, seasonally flooded grassland plain in western Zambia where wilderness can be experienced first hand.
More recently, Raquel joined WWF in Zambia, where she led the Freshwater Programme. For the past five years, her team has worked to maintain the connectivity of the Zambezi basin, setting up water resource protection areas and protecting the natural flow of some of the region’s largest rivers.
Raquel is driven by a desire to create space for nature, and a strong belief that humans benefit greatly when they connect with that nature. One of her favourite pastimes is to grab a backpack and disappear into nature, an activity she has been fortunate enough to enjoy in some of our planet’s wildest places.