[7] The first Indigenous Park in Brazil was created in the river basin by the Brazilian government in the early 1960s.

Currently, fourteen tribes live within Xingu Indigenous Park, surviving on natural resources and extracting from the river most of what they need for food and water.

[9] The river flow in this stretch is highly complex and includes major sections of rapids.

[10][12][13] Many species are seriously threatened by the dam, which will significantly alter the flow in the Volta Grande rapids.

[10][14][15] In the Upper Xingu region was a highly self-organized pre-Columbian anthropogenic landscape, including deposits of fertile agricultural terra preta, black soil in Portuguese, with a network of roads and polities each of which covered about 250 square kilometers.