The Amazon's capital — Belle Époque opera, the Meeting of the Waters, and the most biologically diverse city hinterland on earth
Manaus is the city the rubber boom built — an art nouveau opera house (the Teatro Amazonas, completed 1896) in the middle of the Amazon jungle, a city of 2 million people accessible only by river or air, and the point where the black-water Rio Negro and the brown-water Rio Solimões run side-by-side for 6km without mixing, creating the phenomenon known as the 'Encontro das Águas' (Meeting of the Waters). The city is the economic capital of Amazonas state and the gateway for Amazon tourism, but it is also a genuine metropolis with its own food culture: tacacá (a shrimp and jambu pepper soup ser…
Portuguese colonisers established a fort at the Rio Negro confluence in 1669. The rubber boom (1850–1912) transformed Manaus from a garrison settlement into the wealthiest city in South America — rubber barons imported Italian marble, English iron, and French champagne, culminating in the Teatro Amazonas (1896). The boom collapsed almost overnight when British smuggled rubber seedlings established plantations in British Malaya at a fraction of the cost. The city declined into an economic backwater until Brazil declared it a Free Trade Zone in 1967, attracting electronics manufacturing that ha…