Santarém
"Santarém is the kind of river city that asks you to slow down. It has time in a way that cities usually don't."
Santarém sits at the mouth of the Tapajós River, where it empties into the Amazon, and the city’s identity is built around this junction. Looking north from the waterfront promenade in the evenings, you can see the same two-river phenomenon as near Manaus — green Tapajós water meeting sandy Amazon current — running in a visible line maybe two hundred metres offshore. The locals call it the Encontro das Águas do Tapajós. It’s less celebrated than the one near Manaus, which means you can watch it from a plastic chair with a cold beer and no tour group jostling for position beside you.
I came to Santarém as a midpoint between Manaus and Belém — a river boat journey of roughly three days either direction, sleeping in a hammock strung on the main deck among a hundred other hammocks, waking to the sound of the engine and the smell of the cook starting breakfast. The city itself surprised me. I expected a transit point, something functional and forgettable. What I found was a place with genuine texture: the waterfront Mercado 2000, dense with fish vendors and fruit stalls and the smell of dendê oil heating in enormous pans; the pedestrian shopping streets behind the cathedral, busy in a small-city way; the Museu do Santarém, which holds a collection of Tapajônica ceramics — pre-Columbian pottery from the cultures that occupied this river junction for millennia before the Portuguese arrived.
The Porto de Santarém, where the riverboats dock, has its own character entirely. On the day I arrived, a boat from Manaus was unloading: sacks of manioc flour, crates of beer, motorcycles, a refrigerator, three live pigs in a wooden crate, and a large tortoiseshell cat that had apparently been a stowaway for the whole journey and was now sitting on the dock staring at the new city with professional calm. The wooden hulls of the river boats stacked three deep at the quay, ropes thick as a man’s arm holding them to the posts — this is the working circulatory system of the middle Amazon, and Santarém is one of its main nodes.
From Santarém the Floresta Nacional do Tapajós is accessible by road or river — the forest begins just south of town and runs for more than a million hectares down the Tapajós valley. The communities along the west bank offer guided walks that range from a few hours to multi-day treks. I did a half-day with a guide from the Maguary community: ancient Brazil-nut trees, the sound of leaf-cutter ants working in the undergrowth with a faint rustling urgency, and an explanation of how the whole forest economy of this region was historically organized around the collection cycle of the castanha, the Brazil nut that falls only when it’s ready.
When to go: July to November, when the Tapajós is low and the beaches near Alter do Chão are at their peak. River boats run year-round to and from Manaus and Belém — the three-day hammock journey is one of the more honest ways to grasp the true scale of the Amazon basin.