Manaus Travel Guide

The Amazon Rainforest spans nine South American countries and territories across some 5.5 million square kilometres — over half of the planet's remaining rainforest and the largest on Earth, nicknamed the "lungs of the Earth"; roughly 60% lies in Brazil. Manaus, capital of Amazonas state with about 2.2 million people, is the easiest gateway: boats leave up the Rio Negro and the Amazon mainstream to jungle lodges, where guided parties trek the forest, canoe flooded woodland at high water, spot caimans by night, fish for piranha, look for pink river dolphins and giant otters, and visit indigenous villages. Two signature outings leave from town: the Meeting of the Waters, where the black Rio Negro and the ochre Solimões run side by side for about 6 km without mixing, and the Anavilhanas Archipelago of more than 400 islands. Hundreds of thousands of species are known from here — macaws, sloths, arapaima and electric eels among them — in a climate averaging about 27 °C with some 2,300 mm of rain a year. Manaus itself still shows its rubber-boom opulence in the Amazon Theatre, inaugurated in 1896.

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.