Manaus Travel Guide

The Amazon rainforest is Earth's largest tropical rainforest, called the "lungs of the Earth," harboring the planet's richest biodiversity, and Manaus is the gateway deep into Brazil's Amazon. From here, visitors take boats into the river-laced forest, stay at riverside or forest lodges, and with guides experience jungle treks, canoe trips, night caiman spotting, piranha fishing, indigenous village visits and sunrise/sunset viewing. In the dense primal forest, sloths, pink river dolphins, monkeys and colorful birds await. Deep in this vast, mysterious green world is a soul-stirring natural adventure.

The Amazon Theatre is Manaus's pride—a pink Renaissance-style opera house in the Amazon rainforest, completed in 1896, a testament to the extreme luxury of Manaus's late-19th-century "rubber boom." Rubber barons shipped Italian marble, French glass, British steel and Venetian murals across oceans to build this gilded opera palace in the equatorial rainforest. The striking tiled dome, gorgeous interior halls, ceiling paintings and curtains amaze. Still in use with year-round performances, a tour reveals its glory—a gorgeous cultural pearl in the rainforest.