Leticia

The plane banks hard over the canopy and then there’s a strip of concrete, a single terminal building painted in tropical colours, and heat that hits you like a warm hand pressed flat to the chest. Leticia doesn’t ease you in. The mototaxis are waiting before the luggage carousel has turned once, and within twenty minutes of landing I was on the waterfront, watching a man unload bocachico fish from a dugout canoe while a loudspeaker somewhere behind me played vallenato at maximum volume. This is the capital of Colombian Amazonas department, and it wears its improbability openly — a city of eighty thousand wedged into a corner where Colombia, Peru, and Brazil share a border that the river makes entirely theoretical.

The market is where Leticia makes the most sense. I arrived in the covered mercado at six in the morning, following the smell of charcoal and river mud, and found the fish vendors already mid-conversation with customers who had arrived by boat at four. Tucunaré, arapaima, gamitana — the names were new to me and the fish themselves were enormous, the arapaima so large it barely fit the vendor’s table. Women sold platano verde and yuca in quantities that assumed a household of ten. One stall offered nothing but fariña, the toasted cassava flour that goes on everything here — piled in sacks the colour of pale sand, sold in paper cones. I bought some and ate it by the handful, dry and slightly nutty, the taste of the Amazon made edible.

The waterfront runs along the Malecón, a long concrete promenade that looks across the Amazon to Brazil. On the other side, close enough to shout to, is Tabatinga — the Brazilian city that sits shoulder to shoulder with Leticia without any visible border between them. You can walk across, or take a mototaxi, and suddenly the currency changes and the Portuguese starts and the rice-and-beans on the plate is arranged differently. I went back and forth three times in one afternoon, not because I needed anything but because the act of crossing a national border by foot, without bureaucracy, felt like something worth doing repeatedly until it settled. It never quite did.

In the evenings Leticia concentrates around the plaza, where families occupy benches and vendors push carts selling piragua — shaved ice doused in fruit syrup — and the smell of grilling meat comes from the corner restaurants. I ate dinner at a spot with plastic chairs and a laminated menu and ordered the house fish soup, which arrived in a bowl large enough to bathe a small animal, full of yuca and plantain and a whole bocachico fish navigating the broth with its bones still attached. A man at the next table was eating the same thing without looking at it, reading a newspaper, fully accustomed to abundance.

The logistics of the deeper Amazon begin here. Guides cluster near the waterfront hotels. Fast boats depart for Puerto Nariño in the mornings from the port. The colectivo launches to riverside communities leave without any particular schedule, which you learn the hard way. There is a tourist infrastructure here — lodges outside town, tour operators with laminated brochures — but it sits lightly atop the working city, which is primarily a port, a marketplace, and a place where the three-country geography creates a commerce all its own. I liked Leticia precisely for this — the sense that the Amazon had not been arranged for my arrival.

When to go: Leticia is accessible year-round. June through November is high water season, when the river rises dramatically and the jungle becomes navigable in new ways. December through May offers lower water and more exposed riverbank. Mornings are always more alive than afternoons in the market; arrive early and stay for the river light at sunset.