Amazon rainforest
Floresta amazônica
Interesting facts
- The forest holds an estimated 390 billion individual trees belonging to around 16,000 species.
- More than half of the Saharan dust that fertilises the Amazon blows from a single basin in Chad, the Bodélé Depression, replacing phosphorus washed away by rain.
- Rainforest has covered the Amazon basin for at least 55 million years, since the Eocene epoch.
- Water in the western basin once flowed toward the Pacific; only within the last 5 to 10 million years did it break through to drain east into the Atlantic.
- A 2001 study counted more than 1,100 tree species in just a quarter of a square kilometre of Ecuadorian rainforest.
- Dark, fertile terra preta soils created by indigenous peoples suggest that large parts of the forest were shaped by centuries of human management.
- Excavations at the Caverna da Pedra Pintada show that people were living in the Amazon at least 11,200 years ago.
- Since the 1970s, clearing of the forest has exposed numerous earthwork geoglyphs built between about AD 1 and 1250.
- Francisco de Orellana, the first European to travel the river's length in 1542, named it after the Amazons of Greek myth when women fought beside men against him.
- The British explorer Percy Fawcett vanished in the forest while searching for a lost civilisation he called the City of Z.
Why it is worth it
Manaus sits at a junction that looks wrong even once you know why it happens. The dark, tea-coloured Rio Negro and the pale, sediment-heavy Amazon (locally the Solimões) meet just outside the city and, for several kilometres, run side by side in the same channel without mixing — a visible line down the middle of the river — because the two flows differ enough in temperature, density and speed that they resist blending. Boat operators run tours specifically to put you exactly on that seam.
The forest around that confluence is not simply large; it's disproportionately full. A region covering roughly 1% of the planet's surface holds something like 10% of all known species on Earth, an imbalance that only really makes sense once you start listing what's actually down there: upward of 500 mammal species, a third of the world's bird species, some 30 million kinds of insect, and reptile counts — well over 300 species, including the anaconda — that would be implausible anywhere else.
The water itself carries its own celebrities. Pink river dolphins work the flooded channels near Manaus alongside the pirarucu, one of the largest freshwater fish alive, which gulps air at the surface because the oxygen-poor water beneath sometimes isn't enough on its own. None of it reads as exceptional to the people who live there — it's just what the river does — which is itself the most telling fact about the place.
Getting there
6 km from Manaus. Eduardo Gomes International Airport (MAO) is about 14 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Amazon Theatre 3.4 km · opera-house
- Meeting of Waters (Manaus) 14.2 km · river
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Amazon rainforest, also called the Amazon jungle, Amazonia, or simply the Amazon, is a moist broadleaf tropical rainforest in the Amazon biome that covers most of the Amazon basin of South America. This basin encompasses 7 million km2 (2.7 million sq mi), of which 6 million km2 (2.3 million sq mi) are covered by the rainforest. This region includes territory belonging to nine nations and 3,344 indigenous territories.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
-3.16000, -60.03000per Wikidata