The Gran Chaco is the largest forest area of Latin America after the Amazon. It represents the biggest woodland area in Argentina and the most affected by policies of irrational exploitation of the environmental heritage. This situation undermines its important biodiversity, social heterogeneity and the diversity of identities and threatens the existence of its inhabitants. The journey to the region of the Gran Chaco is a rite of passage in a transitional, complex, ever-changing order. The Chaco attracts and terrifies, welcomes and bewilders; it smells of dust and blood, alcohol and coca leaves, breast milk and sweat. It is a desire of water and justice. “You can enter into the Chaco; you can leave it”, so say the people living on the banks of the Pilcomayo River, which divides Argentina from Paraguay. As if where the paved road ends and the forest begins, a world is replaced by another: the Land, that the Wichí people call “Honhat”, the most precious and precarious thing for indigenous people and campesinos who inhabit the semi-arid region, affected by decades of political struggles to obtain the legal title of the lands where they live, with distinct but related forms, mutable but persistent, transforming the space into culturally organized territories, coexisting with the spirits, plants, animals, the forest and the river. Honhat (or Pachamama, as campesinos call it), is the concrete base of life but, at the same time, it is not only a physical- space, it is a socio-cultural and spiritual place. “Honhat” is part of a large ethnographic research about the restitution land process that I started conducting from 2009 in Salta Province (Argentine). It is dedicated to the encounter with the complexity of this arid and warm land and its people, to those who over the years have been able to draw paths, teaching me other possible ways of living; to their daily struggles, their challenges and desires, the smiles, the silences. To everything we shared.