They’re Giant. They’re Cuddly-Looking. I Traveled to a City Where They’ve Taken Over—and Learned the Startling Truth About What They’re Facing.

On a tall, green riverbank between two highways in São Paulo, Brazil, a woman with round glasses and a big smile looks out at the water. “Princesa!” she sings.

A giant, squarish brown head appears, cutting a wake as it heads toward shore. Webbed claws clutch at a rock, and slowly, awkwardly, the creature lifts her rounded, barrel-like body out of the river. Then she climbs the bank, through wild grass and past purple flowers, toward the friendly human who called her. The woman crouches, coaxing the animal with sweet compliments and a stick of sugarcane she brought with her. Huge front teeth bite down on the cane, and the creature chews.

“Princesa” is probably familiar to you. Not her specifically, but her kind—she’s a capybara, a type of rodent. The world’s largest type of rodent, actually; a capybara can easily rival a golden retriever in size. And in charisma, too: Capybaras, native to South America, have become laid-back social media stars, globally beloved for their Zen-like acceptance of seemingly all other animals (here’s a spider monkey riding a capybara) and their love of water (here are some capybaras crashing the fountain outside the Mato Grosso state legislature). Their long, heavy eyelids give them a look of drowsy calm; the adjective most often associated with them is “chill.” They are adorable despite their quirky physique—square in the front, round in the back—or maybe because of it. Their odd shape, combined with their ambling demeanor, inspires curiosity, as well as a lot of plush stuffed animals.

Watching a capybara come when called is a highly Instagrammable moment, my in-person proof that capybaras have rightfully earned their status as a 2020s internet meme. But on my visit to the Pinheiros River in São Paulo, South America’s largest city, I also saw up close how not all capybaras are living their best life, to put it lightly.

Many of Brazil’s estimated 1.2 million capybaras have migrated from their natural habitats, forests and grasslands along rivers and lakes, to cities. There, they don’t have to worry about their natural predators, like jaguars and anacondas. But urban capybaras soon find themselves with a whole new set of problems. They struggle with river trash that can injure and even strangle them, as well as unnatural predators ranging from dogs to cars and even humans—attacks on capybaras are, sadly, not unheard of.

Other humans, like Mariana Aidar, president of the animal-welfare nonprofit Projeto CAPA—the woman presently holding out the sugarcane to the capybara snacking away on the riverbank—are fighting for their capybara neighbors to survive. Aidar and a team of volunteers look after about 120 capybaras living along the Pinheiros River. It’s one of the largest concentrations of capybaras in São Paulo, though its exact number of members fluctuates.

Aidar had called the capybara “princess” in a way that sounded like a term of endearment for all female capybaras, so I asked for the capybara’s formal name.

She doesn’t have one, Aidar told me. She used to name the river capybaras. She stopped after Judith, one of her favorites, was killed by a car while trying to cross a highway.

“There’s a few that still have names,” Aidar says, “but I stopped giving them names, because when they die, it makes me so sad.” Now, she tries to keep some emotional distance.

Brazilian experts like to say that capybaras didn’t come to cities; the cities came to them. If, say, a housing development plops down where you live, you are forced to wander. Capybaras have been migrating to cities since the 2000s, as Brazilian metro areas grew, displacing their old habitats. Meanwhile, environmental restoration has made some of Brazil’s urban riverbanks and lagoons friendlier to capybaras.

The capybaras’ stretch of the Pinheiros River is a former no-man’s-land; geographically, it’s in the center of the city, and yet isolated, sandwiched between an expressway’s northbound and southbound lanes. To visit by car, you’ve got to take the expressway south to an easy-to-miss exit and make two quick U-turns down to the riverbank. Still, international tourists show up daily in the park, Aidar says, hoping for a capybara sighting.

That people make the trek is a sign of the animals’ global popularity. Capybaras’ internet fame traces back at least to 2007, when Caplin Rous, a 6-week-old capybara, licked a camera. Later, in 2018, a photographer named Katsuhito Watanabe exploded in popularity outside his native Japan with his videos of capybaras in yuzu baths. These days, you can buy a custom capybara for Minecraft. A capybara named Chispi appeared in the Disney movie Encanto, and a friendly capybara played a big role in Flow, which won the 2025 Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Capybaras also had a brief noirish cameo in the recent Oscar-nominated Brazilian film The Secret Agent. Beyond the screens (silver, and smartphone), there are capybara stuffed animals of all shapes and sizes—an $8.99 “emotional support capybara” from the company Fungi Fun holds up a sign that reads, “I believe in you big time. You’re doing better than you think!”

But Aidar came to her love for capybaras in a totally analog way. “I started to ride my bicycle here about eight years ago,” she recalls, as we sit at a café table along the riverbank, “and I didn’t accept that there were a lot of hurt animals here and nobody did anything to help them.”

Helping capybaras and other wild and stray animals brought her to the river more often, and the pandemic-era closure of a flavored-vodka factory she managed led to her career change. In addition to running Projeto CAPA, Aidar now manages the 14-mile bike path along one riverbank of the Pinheiros, and a mileslong state park along the other. And she’s recently cut the ribbon on Café do Capa, an open-air capybara-themed stop along the cycling path. The café’s profits go to Projeto CAPA.

Café do Capa sells capybara-shaped fried foods, capybara-themed cupcakes, capybara gifts. There are plastic capybaras kids can climb on. The clientele is mostly cyclists in helmets and spandex-y bike tops and shorts. (Getting to Café do Capa requires going over a floating bike bridge that is not open to pedestrians, but Aidar has created a loophole: Café do Capa supplies yellow dummy bikes—unrideable because they have no chain—that people can walk with.) Capybaras occasionally wander into the café, though petting them isn’t allowed. “Most people keep their distance,” says Aidar, “but sometimes we need to remind them.”

If you’re just visiting the area, successfully seeing a capybara on the river is a low-odds affair. The best times to encounter them are at dawn or dusk, when most tourists are sleeping or sipping caipirinhas. During the day, if it’s hot—which is usually is in São Paulo—capybaras stay in the water. If it’s cold, they keep warm in the bushes. “It’s very difficult for me to say, ‘OK, go to this place at this time: You’re gonna see capybaras,’ ” Aidar says. “No, it’s impossible, because they go wherever they want to go.”

But traveling with Aidar in her truck (which has a “Capy On Board” sticker on the back), I saw plenty. We spent about an hour driving up and down the riverbank, and pretty quickly, she found a group of capybaras sunning themselves at one of their favorite spots, a narrow strip of dirt and mud right at the water and near a tall cable-stayed bridge.

We counted nine capybaras: an adult male, four adult females, and four medium-sized pups. She pointed out one pup with a piece of trash encircling its neck. The storm drains of São Paulo, population 12 million, empty into the rivers, carrying all sorts of trash from city streets. Capybaras spend most of their time in the water—they’re sort of the penguins of the rodent world—so they can easily get entangled in that storm-drain trash. That’s especially bad for young capybaras. If plastic gets stuck on their bodies, it can dig into their skin as they grow.

Two or three times a week, Aidar and volunteers scissor trash off capybaras’ necks: dangerous work that requires the humans to protect themselves with nets, fences, and shields from angry capybaras who don’t understand their good intentions. Capybaras could attack if threatened, though they hardly ever do. (Still, because of the tourists, Aidar has put up signs in Portuguese and English warning people to stay 12 feet away from the capybaras and reminding them that they’re wild animals.)

Cutting trash off capybaras is just one part of Projeto CAPA’s work; the state government has authorized the nonprofit to manage and monitor capybaras and other wild animals along the river and conduct rescues when necessary. Among the volunteers are local veterinarians who are ready to help an injured capybara with 15 minutes’ notice. Biologists test the capybaras weekly to confirm they haven’t caught Brazilian spotted fever—a tick-borne disease often fatal to humans. It can kill capybaras too, though many survive it and develop immunity. So far, Aidar says, the Pinheiros River capybaras have always tested negative. If a group ever tests positive, Projeto CAPA will seek the state’s permission to quarantine them, sterilize them, and treat their part of the riverbank with insecticide.

Sometimes, though, capybaras need more help than they can get from these drop-in visits—a fact that, along with the species’ rising popularity, has ushered some capybaras of Brazil into a new kind of lifestyle entirely.

If you’re visiting São Paulo and want to see capybaras, the São Paulo Zoo is your only guarantee. The zoo didn’t have capybaras until 2024, when it took in three rescued from the Pinheiros River—Miguel, Kiwi, and Bonne Année. All three were found as babies, abandoned by their groups, and they recovered at a city wildlife rehab center. Projeto CAPA rescued Bonne Année, who weighed only 3 pounds and needed IV fluids, and Kiwi, who’d been hit by a car and had a wound on his back and a broken leg. Miguel, rescued by environmental police, had injuries and needed nutritional supplements.

Now Miguel is the star of the zoo’s Simba Safari, a series of planned habitats that tourist trucks pass through. Like capybaras in the wild, zoo capybaras are polygamous, with one alpha male and several females forming a sort of harem. (I did not inquire about the lonely life of a beta male capybara in the wild.) When I visited Simba Safari in early January, Miguel was a new dad: Three pups were born in December, and a second of his three girlfriends was pregnant.

Zoo biologist Michele Viana introduced me directly to Miguel, who was raised by hand and bottle-fed in rehab. He spent a full minute sniffing my legs and shoes, after coming up to Viana to be petted. (A capybara’s fur is rough, like straw, but its nose and the little fur around its nose are very soft.) He’s so friendly Viana called him a “capy-dog.” Simba Safari’s three adult females, originally from another zoo, were more aloof, though one came close for a while. They’re less trusting of humans than Miguel, which is just fine with zoo managers: That’s normal capybara behavior. The capybaras share Simba Safari’s Brazil enclosure with two tapirs and 16 rheas (South American birds similar to emus). They’re vegetarians: They eat grass, alfalfa, cassava, sweet potato, carrots, beets, and, at the zoo, a commercial feed. They chitter like birds, or like an ’80s video game laser gun.

As we watched the group wander about, a female capybara waded into a mud puddle along the truck path and rolled around happily. Miguel walked up the hill toward his babies. At one point father and baby ate grass together, the big grass fronds flickering around their heads as they chomped.

The zoo doesn’t just go capture animals in the wild, Viana told me. They acquire them from either another zoo or a rescue, and there are only so many rescued capybaras. That’s one reason why capybaras are recent additions to a zoo that has been open since the 1950s, on a continent where the rodents’ ancestors arrived some 40 million years ago.

But the zoo also seems to have responded to demand. Capybara merch is wildly popular in the zoo’s gift shops, which sell 25,000 capybara-themed items a year: almost 7,000 plush toys, plus key chains, backpacks, cups, caps, bottles, slippers, and lamps.

I asked whether Brazilians’ attitude toward capybaras has changed.

“Oh yeah,” Viana said, smiling. “The hype started in Japan. In Japan there are even cafés where you have contact with capybaras. And the internet helped, and the public is always curious. They want to know about the species.” Until then, “people weren’t so interested because it’s a common and endemic animal here in Brazil. Then with the internet, that little bite of curiosity started. And then they saw that they are calm, that the babies are cute.”

Brazilians have been living with capybaras forever, dodging them on roads like rural American drivers dodge deer. But the world’s digital embrace of the big native rodents seems to have inspired a new appreciation of them, even a sort of national pride. (Imagine if deer or squirrels became the world’s new internet crush, leading to a new U.S. deer or squirrel craze.) But another factor is that more capybaras are living closer to humans than they used to, and the furry neighbors are charming.

For Helena Nicoleti, 8, who wore a T-shirt to the zoo featuring a capybara drinking bubble tea, seeing Kiwi was a highlight, along with the lion and the Mexican axolotl. But Kiwi was the only capybara out in the regular exhibit that morning, and her family hadn’t made it to Simba Safari. Helena’s mother, Camila Nicoleti, who was also wearing a capybara T-shirt, said they were frustrated: One capybara wasn’t enough. “We wanted more,” Nicoleti said. They live in Monte Alto, in the countryside of São Paulo state, and often go to a neighboring town, Jaboticabal, to see capybaras in the urban wild. “There are lots of capybaras there by the lake—lots and lots of them,” Nicoleti said. Helena thinks capybaras are “really cute,” Nicoleti said, “and the chubbier the capybara, the more she likes them.”

International visitors agree. “I probably weirded out my Brazilian in-laws when I requested to come to this park to hang out with capybaras all day, but can you blame me?” wrote a recent poster on the r/capybara subreddit, sharing photos of capybaras lazing around and swimming in Parque Barigui in Curitiba (where capy-sighting percentages are much higher than in São Paulo).

Photographer Julio Szymanski of Cascavel, a city in Paraná state, says his best-selling urban landscape photos feature some of the 150 or so capybaras that live in a downtown park. Customers like the photos that capture the capybaras doing something humanlike: crossing a street at a crosswalk, or lined up as if to pose for him. “There’s a problem, that they procreate a lot, but people have learned to respect them,” he says. Many Brazilians, he says, are creating capybara trademarks and logos. (Here’s Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, holding a capybara necktie.)

Curitiba, the capital of Paraná, has become so famous for its parks’ capybaras that the city government recently created an Instagram video with an A.I. cartoon capybara warning people not to touch it. “Friend, I know we are beautiful, photogenic city icons,” the capybara says. “But you already know you can’t pet us! The fact that we are hanging out in the park doesn’t mean we are pets. Admire us from afar and leave us in peace, OK?”

Brazilians involved in capybara welfare tend to agree: Capybaras are wild animals, not pets. They don’t like the capybara cafés of Japan and beyond (one opened in Florida last year, but a plan to open one in Britain has attracted opposition from animal-welfare groups). They say wild animals shouldn’t be taken out of their natural habitat; capybaras love water, mud, and grass, and it’s cruel to take them away from it. “Can you imagine, you get a wild animal from nature and put four walls around the animal, for people to get inside, drink coffee, and touch them?” asks Aidar. “It’s absurd.” Sadly, confinement isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a capybara who has a run-in with a human.

In Brazil, it’s illegal to possess a wild animal without authorization from the government. In 2023, Ibama, the Brazilian environmental agency, intervened to seize a capybara named Filó from an influencer in the Amazon who had put baby clothes on her and showered with her. The influencer was fined about $3,400, but he convinced a judge to order Ibama to release Filó back to her habitat in the rainforest near the influencer’s house. Aidar was quoted in the news about Filó, saying she objected to the influencer bringing Filó into his house, touching her, and treating her like a human. “People have to understand that animals have to live the way they were born to live,” she told me, “and not the way people want them to live.”

In Rio de Janeiro, biologist Mário Moscatelli, who’s spent decades restoring mangroves in the city’s gorgeous Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon, is now speaking on behalf of the lagoon’s capybaras. They showed up about five years ago, likely migrating along rivers. Today, he says, there’s a male and female with six babies at the lagoon, plus another couple and a lone male.

Moscatelli uses government funding for public education programs, fencing, and signs encouraging human-capybara coexistence. “Attention: Capybara—Wild Animal Crossing,” reads one such sign along the bike path circling the lagoon.

“At the cycle path we have the fast-and-furious people that are riding their bikes or electric bikes,” he says, “so we put up a lot of signs to alert people about the presence of capybaras.”

The fences are to protect capybaras from humans and their unleashed dogs, who will often smell a capybara and attack. “There were even cases that people intervened, and everybody got bitten,” Moscatelli says—that is, dogs bit capybaras, who bit dogs and humans. Four people were sent to the hospital because of that, including a pregnant woman, he says.

A well-known figure in the news in Rio, Moscatelli calls the capybaras by human names to sensitize humans to them. He usually names the females Margarida, and the males Ricardo (after a joke from an old Brazilian comedy, in which “Ricardo” is the guy whom a character’s wife cheats on him with).

Moscatelli tries to humanize the capybaras so that real humans become more humane. He’s been looking out for them since 2023, when, he says, a female capybara was found dead near the lagoon, likely stoned to death by humans. He says three capybara families have been exterminated at the lagoon; he’s found dead capybaras with bloody noses and others with bullet wounds, and he’s seen people encouraging their unleashed dogs to approach capybaras at the lagoon. Capybaras “let you get very close to them, so it’s easy to do harm to them,” he says.

Though it’s hard to always verify the cause of death, Moscatelli thinks some people may have retaliated after their dogs were injured in canine-capybara fights, while some people from poor communities may have killed capybaras for meat.

“We have a socioeconomic problem in Rio de Janeiro—we have very wealthy people, and we have very destitute people,” Moscatelli says. “And we have bad people.” He’s even heard rumors, from supporters of his work, that some restaurants in Rio serve capybara meat to certain customers as a clandestine menu item.

Moscatelli wants the city and state governments to spend more, and to establish a wildlife care center for the lagoon capybaras’ health, monitoring, and population control. They haven’t so far. “Capybaras don’t vote, and they don’t pay taxes,” he observes.

In March, after my interview with Moscatelli, came a new example of cruelty to capybaras. Police in Rio announced the arrest of six men and two teenagers who were reportedly caught on camera beating a capybara with stones, sticks, and iron bars in another part of the city. The suspects told police they’d wanted to kill the capybara for its meat; prosecutors have charged them with animal cruelty and illegal hunting. After two months in a wildlife rehab center, the capybara was finally released in a safer, forested area.

São Paulo has also seen cases of capybara mistreatment—like kids throwing rocks, and one instance involving a man who tied a rope around a capybara—according to Marcello Nardi, a veterinarian with the city’s wildlife rehab center, which partners with Projeto CAPA and nursed the zoo’s three rescue capybaras. “Some people call for a rescue because others want to kill the animal,” he says. “Sometimes you just need to show up and talk to the community, to get them to back off, leave it alone.”

Often, São Paulo capybaras just need rescuing after they’ve trespassed: Sometimes a capybara has made its way into a home or business overnight and needs bailing out. Nardi has picked up capybaras from a supermarket warehouse, a shopping-mall parking lot, and a gas station on a busy avenue. That’s not easy, since capybaras max out at around 155 pounds; sometimes he anesthetizes them for the trip back to the river.

But even people who don’t mean to hurt capybaras can still do harm to them, an unfortunate side effect of them living in such proximity to humans. Despite their internet reputation for being chill, capybaras are among the wild animals that can actually die of stress, a condition called capture myopathy. “Even though capybaras don’t look stressed, they are actually very stressed,” Nardi says—especially if they think they’re going to be prey. Sometimes, concerned humans crowd around an injured capybara, he says, not knowing it’s better to leave them alone and go for help.

After visiting São Paulo’s wild capybaras, I wondered if the rodents had made a mistake by moving to the big city. A week later, I was riding a scenic railroad out of Tiradentes, a historic town in Minas Gerais state about 300 miles northeast of São Paulo, when we came upon some country capybaras sunning themselves in a field. “Capivaras!” exclaimed one Brazilian passenger after another, all of whom had passed cows and horses without much reaction. The capybaras, chill as ever, barely acknowledged the train. And they were in no danger from people. Their life looked idyllic. What if the urban capybaras could have this?

But a human-imposed capybara back-to-the-land movement would fail. Capybara removals tend to be ineffective, Ibama, the environmental agency, wrote to me in an email, “since environmentally favorable areas are usually quickly reoccupied.” Despite cities’ trash, speeding cars, dogs, and humans, capybaras see plenty of upsides in urban riverside living: water, food, and shelter—plus no pumas, which have been known to eat young capybaras. Since city capybaras are there to stay, Ibama recommends fences, river cleanup, and “the incorporation of wildlife into urban planning.”

In other words, it’s up to humans to manage their coexistence with the new giant-rodent neighbors.

“Capybaras are not heaven or hell,” Nardi says. “They’re not a giant hamster that you’re going to pick up and pet. They can attack you. In general, though, they’re not aggressive if you respect them, if you keep your distance, if you simply observe.”

It’s tough to be a curious and charismatic wild animal. Some humans want to hurt you, and others want to crowd, cage, and cuddle you—when what you really need is just grass, mud, clean water, and a little space.