Gateway to the Amazon — Madeira River, rubber boom history
Porto Velho is the capital of Rondônia state and a gateway to the Brazilian Amazon's western frontier. The city grew around the Madeira-Mamoré railway — known as the 'Devil's Railroad' — built between 1907 and 1912 at enormous human cost to bypass the rapids of the Madeira River for Bolivian rubber. Today the riverfront is lined with floating fish restaurants and the ghost of the railway provides the city's main historical narrative. Boat trips up the Madeira lead into pristine Amazon rainforest.
The region was opened during the rubber boom of the 1880s–1910s. The Madeira-Mamoré railway was built to connect landlocked Bolivia's rubber-rich areas to the Amazon river system, at a cost of thousands of workers' lives to malaria and accidents during construction. Porto Velho was formally established in 1914. The city saw explosive growth in the 1970s during Brazil's military government's Amazon colonisation drive, transforming it from a small river port to a regional centre.