The Amazon Maldives — a white sand freshwater beach on the Tapajos river, piranha fishing at dusk, and the clearest water in the Amazon basin
Alter do Chao is a small town on the Rio Tapajos in Para state of the Brazilian Amazon — 35km south of Santarem on a paved road, at the confluence of the Tapajos (a clearwater river, the sediment deposited upstream, leaving the lower Tapajos transparent blue-green) and the Arapiuns. The town is famous for its beach season (July-December, when the Amazon river system drops and the white sand beaches emerge from the Tapajos riverbanks): the Ilha do Amor (Love Island — a large sand spit accessible by canoe from the Alter do Chao waterfront, 5 minutes) appears from the falling river level with th…
Alter do Chao was a Borari indigenous settlement at the Tapajos mouth before Portuguese contact. The Borari people were decimated by the Directorate system (the Portuguese colonial policy of forced integration and labour extraction from Amazonian indigenous communities, 1755-1798), their population collapsing from estimated thousands to the remnant community of approximately 1,500 people who continue to identify as Borari today, with a village on the Tapajos bank above Alter do Chao. The town developed as a rubber-era settlement in the late 19th century, and the beach festival (Festival do Ca…