Manaus
A city of two million in the middle of the rainforest, with no road in from the south — you arrive by air or by boat
- When to go
- September 29° · 8 rainy days
- Per day
- €€price 2 of 5
- How many days
- 3days
- For you
- 6 questions →
- Nearest airport
- 8 km Manaus
- Right now
Manaus is not a destination but a gateway: you come for what is upriver. The city itself takes half a day — the opera house, the market, the meeting of the waters — and everything else means a boat and at least two nights in a lodge upriver.
The city was built by rubber. Between 1890 and 1910 Manaus was one of the wealthiest cities on earth, with electricity before most European capitals and an opera house of Italian marble and French glass, hauled three thousand kilometres upriver. Then rubber seeds were smuggled to Asia, prices collapsed, and within a decade the city was poor. The Teatro Amazonas is still there and still working.
The meeting of the waters is the one natural sight in the city itself: the Rio Negro runs black and warm, the Solimões silty and cooler, and they flow side by side for six kilometres before mixing. You see it from a boat, on a half-day trip or on the way to a lodge. This is the thing that goes on postcards, and fairly so — it looks exactly like that.
For the forest you choose a lodge and a number of nights, and that is where the mistakes happen. A day trip means a village visit and caimans by torchlight; that is the edge of the Amazon rather than the Amazon. Two nights upriver already give a night boat ride, walking with a guide, piranha fishing and waking at five because of the birds. The river rises from December and peaks in June, when it stands about ten metres higher than in October and November and the boat goes in among the canopy — that is the better period, not the worse.
Guides for Manaus
Shorter, practical pages for one concrete question each — how many days, how much money, where to sleep, where to escape the city.
Manaus in 3 days
→Two days at a lodge a hundred kilometres out, then the city on the third afternoon — which is why that day cannot be a…
What to see in Manaus
The Teatro Amazonas
An opera house from 1896, its dome covered in three hundred and sixty thousand tiles in the colours of the Brazilian flag. The tour is half an hour; a concert is cheap and often free, and worth hunting for in the programme.
The meeting of the waters
The black Negro and the silty Solimões run side by side for six kilometres before mixing, because of differences in temperature, density and speed. Only visible from a boat.
The Adolfo Lisboa market
An 1882 hall modelled on Les Halles, holding fish you see nowhere else — two-metre pirarucu and tucunaré. Go at six in the morning, when the boats unload.
- A
A lodge upriver
Two nights give the whole programme: a night boat ride, walking with a guide, piranhas and dawn with the birds. A day trip is a drive to a souvenir shop with a caiman.
Presidente Figueiredo
Two hours north by road, the one part of the Amazon you reach by car — waterfalls, caves and swimming. A good day out when a boat is not an option.
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The Museum of the Amazon
A patch of forest with a forty-two-metre tower that looks out over the canopy. Fifteen minutes from town and the best way to grasp what the word canopy means.
Two things you probably did not know
The opera house in Manaus was built in 1896 in the middle of the rainforest, from Italian marble and French glass, with rubber money. Everything came by ship fifteen hundred kilometres up the Amazon.
Brazil's rubber monopoly was broken in 1876 by the Englishman Henry Wickham, who took seventy thousand seeds out of the Amazon. Plantations in Asia grew from them, the price collapsed, and within a decade Manaus had lost its reason to exist.
Ready for Manaus?
Within reach from here
Places sorted by straight-line distance from Manaus — day trips or weekends.
Brazil
→A country where the flight between two cities is often cheaper, and always faster, than the overnight coach
Argentina
→A country 3,700 kilometres long, where the far south is seen in December and the whales and the snow in August
Portugal
→A country that spent centuries looking at the ocean instead of the Europe behind it
All 277 places we write about sit on one page — narrow them down by continent, country, price or what you are travelling for.
Within reach from here: San Pedro de Atacama, Foz do Iguaçu and Salvador
See how much of that actually suits you — or pin Manaus if you have been.
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