Belém

I arrived by overnight bus from São Luís, which is a long way to arrive by bus from anywhere, and the driver let us off at the Rodoviária just as the sky was lightening. I walked directly to Ver-o-Peso, because someone on the bus had told me to go before the ice melted, and she was right. The market begins before first light: the fishing boats have been coming in since three, unloading pirarucu and tucunaré and mapará and species I didn’t know the names of, and by five-thirty the fish halls are in full operational chaos — the smell of ice and scales and the river itself, women in white coats wielding knives with the efficiency of surgeons, the sounds of engines and haggling and crates being dropped on concrete. I bought nothing for half an hour. I just moved through it, adjusting to the scale.

Belém is a city of 1.4 million at the mouth of the Pará River, which is technically a distributary of the Amazon — the distinction is geographically meaningful but practically irrelevant, because the water moving past the city’s waterfront has been travelling from the Andes for weeks, passing through more square kilometres of forest than most countries contain, before exhaling into the Atlantic here. The city wears this position at the end of things with a certain grandeur: the nineteenth-century colonial architecture of the Cidade Velha, the mango trees that shade every other street so comprehensively that walking in the midday heat becomes almost bearable, the Teatro da Paz with its neoclassical columns and the sound of pigeons from inside.

The food of Belém is unlike anything else in Brazil. Tucupi — the fermented juice of the manioc root, bright yellow, with a faint bitterness and a warmth that creeps up slowly — appears in several dishes. In tacacá, it arrives as a hot broth with dried shrimp and jambu leaf that numbs your mouth in the best way possible. In pato no tucupi, an entire duck is cooked in it until the meat falls from the bone, the sauce developing a depth that requires several hours of reduction and a cook who has made it three hundred times. I ate tacacá every morning I was in Belém, from the gourds of the street vendors near the market, standing up, because the vendors don’t offer chairs and the queues don’t slow down.

The açaí in Belém is not the sweetened purple smoothie bowl you know from everywhere else. Here it arrives as a thick dark paste in a bowl, slightly sour, almost savory, and people eat it with fish and farinha de tapioca as a meal, not a dessert. A man at a stall near the market watched me eat my first bowl with some skepticism and asked if I liked it. I said it tasted nothing like what I’d had before. He nodded as if this confirmed something. They sweeten it for export, he said, which changes everything. This was accurate.

Outside the city, the mangal — the Amazon’s mangrove forest — stretches along the coast and the estuary islands, accessible by small boat from the port. A guide took me through the channels on a rising tide, the mangrove roots arching in and out of the dark water, land crabs retreating into their holes ahead of the hull, the air close and humid and smelling of salt and mud and decomposition in a way that was not unpleasant. The egrets stood in the high roots looking indifferent. A kingfisher, very blue, shot past the boat so fast I only understood what I had seen after it was gone.

When to go: June through December is the drier, cooler season — temperatures drop to the low thirties (still warm by most standards) and the humidity is fractionally more manageable. January through May is the full rainy season; the mangals flood and the city gets very wet, but the Ver-o-Peso market is magnificent in the rain. The Círio de Nazaré pilgrimage festival in October brings more than a million people to the streets and is one of the most powerful religious events in South America — extraordinary to witness, but plan accommodation far ahead.