Presidente Figueiredo
"Nobody associates the Amazon with waterfalls until they've spent a day at Presidente Figueiredo getting soaked by a dozen of them."
The 'land of waterfalls,' a jungle town outside Manaus with more cachoeiras than anyone could visit in a single trip.
Presidente Figueiredo bills itself as the “terra das cachoeiras” — land of waterfalls — and after a day there I understood the claim was more literal than marketing. The municipality counts over a hundred documented waterfalls within its borders, carved into the sandstone plateau a couple of hours north of Manaus, and it exists as a completely different register of Amazon travel than the river lodges and dolphin excursions everyone associates with the region. This is jungle as adventure park: hiking trails, natural pools, rappelling, caves, all tucked into rainforest that still feels thoroughly wild.
We rented a car in Manaus and drove up the BR-174, a highway that itself cuts through some spectacular unbroken forest, and based ourselves in the small town for two nights. The most-visited falls, Cachoeira Iracema, sits inside a state park and drops through a series of stepped pools shaded by dense canopy — busy on weekends with local families but still strikingly beautiful, the kind of place where you understand instantly why it draws Manaus residents escaping the city heat.
The better experience, in my opinion, was hiring a local guide for the more remote falls that require actual hiking to reach. We spent a morning trekking to Cachoeira do Santuário, wading through a stream that doubled as the trail for stretches, our guide pointing out poison dart frogs the size of a thumbnail and a tarantula burrow he insisted on showing us up close (Lia was significantly less enthusiastic about this than I was). The falls themselves, when we reached them, dropped into a pool cold enough to make you gasp, ringed by rock walls draped in ferns.
Presidente Figueiredo also sits near several cave systems, including the Gruta do Refúgio, home to a colony of bats that pour out at dusk in numbers dense enough to blur into smoke against the sky — a spectacle we caught almost by accident, having lingered near the cave mouth longer than planned while our guide explained the local bat conservation efforts. Between the waterfalls, the caves, and a startling amount of accessible rainforest for a town two hours from a major city, it made a convincing case for itself as the adventure-sports counterpart to the Amazon’s slower river-based experiences.
When to go: June to November for the driest trails and safest stream crossings. The wet season, December to May, swells the waterfalls to their most dramatic but makes some hiking trails genuinely difficult or unsafe.