Around forty million years ago, when the Andes began to form themselves by pushing up from the earth, a vast inland sea burst through from what is now known as the main Amazon basin. The natural bursting point was more or less the site of modern-day ÓBIDOS. The huge sea squeezed itself through where […]

Travelling south up the Rio Tapajós, between twelve and fourteen hours from Santarém depending on the time of year (the current is much stronger in the rainy season), you come to another face of the Amazon, the gold-rush town of ITAITUBA. The boat journey here is one of the main reasons for going – […]

If you only have time to visit one river town in the middle Amazon, it should be MONTE ALEGRE. Most of the town is built along the brow of a steep hill with spectacular views out across marshes and freshwater lakes, with the Amazon to the south and jagged hills to the north and […]

Some five or six hours away from Santarém by boat, through a maze of islands and lakes on the north bank of the Amazon, is ALENQUER, a typical small Amazon river town rarely visited by tourists. The town is interesting enough, but wouldn’t on its own detain you for more than a couple of […]

Fordlândia and Belterra are the fruits of an attempt by Henry Ford to revive the Amazon rubber trade in the first half of the twentieth century. Ford’s intention was to establish a Brazilian plantation to challenge the growing power of the British- and Dutch-controlled rubber cartels, based in the Far East. He was sold […]

An essential day-trip if you can manage it is to one of the Amazon’s few national parks within easy reach of a town or city, the Floresta Nacional do Tapajós. Some 30,000 hectares of preserved upland forest riddled by trails, it includes around 50km of Tapajós river frontage, where there are a number of […]

The municipality of Santarém, which is slightly bigger than Belgium, has just 32km of asphalted road. A good two-thirds of this is accounted for by the road that leads from Santarém to its beach resort of ALTER DO CHÃO, and you can’t fault their transport priorities. Alter do Chão is a very beautiful bay […]