Belém

• 1. Introduction

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  Belém sits roughly 100 kilometers upriver from the Atlantic Ocean, yet it calls itself the gateway to the Amazon. That name is not marketing. It is geography. Every ship carrying Brazil nuts, iron ore, jute, or hardwoods out of the Amazon basin passes through this city before reaching the sea. Founded in January 1616 by Portuguese captain-general Francisco Caldeira Castelo Branco, Belém has spent four centuries at the hinge between the interior rainforest and the wider world. Today its metropolitan area holds nearly two and a half million people. Its nickname is the Cidade das Mangueiras, the City of Mango Trees, and its largest annual event draws enough believers to fill the streets for five hours straight. How did a wooden fort built on a mistaken reading of a river bay grow into the commercial heart of northern Brazil? And what does a city that was part of Portugal until 1775 look like when you walk its streets today?

• 2. A Fort on a Mistaken Bay

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  On the 12th of January 1616, Francisco Caldeira Castelo Branco dropped anchor in what is now Guajará Bay, a confluence of the Pará and Guamá rivers that the Tupinambá people called Guaçu Paraná. He believed he had found the main channel of the Amazon. He was wrong. Thirty leagues upstream, some 178 kilometers, he built a wooden fort thatched with straw and named it Presépio, meaning nativity scene. The settlement around it he called Feliz Lusitânia, Fortunate Lusitania. The mission behind the fort was political as much as military: the Governor General of Brazil had dispatched the expedition to push back French, Dutch, and English traders who were moving up the river from Cabo do Norte in Grão Pará. The fort achieved a partial result. It did not stop foreign trade, but it did discourage foreign settlement. The colony took on several names over the following decades before the name Belém, the Portuguese rendering of Bethlehem, from the Hebrew meaning house of bread, settled into common use. In 1655 it received city status. By 1772, when Pará was separated from Maranhão as its own state, Belém became the state capital.

• 3. Boom, Bust, and Rubber

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  Sugar was the first engine of the Belém economy, and it ran steadily through the end of the 17th century. After that, the city's fortunes turned cyclical. Cattle ranching took over until the 18th century, when rice, cotton, and coffee cultivation became profitable. When southern Brazil proved better suited to those crops, Belém contracted again. Then the Amazon rubber industry arrived and the city became its main export hub. By 1866, the opening of the Amazon, Tocantins, and Tapajós rivers to navigation deepened that role further. The rubber era reached its peak between 1910 and 1912. The wealth it produced left physical traces that are still visible. The intendent Antônio Lemos drove modernization projects across the city during this period. The wealthy elite commissioned large town mansions in the eclectic style, many built on French models. One example is the Bibi Costa Mansion. The Theatro da Paz, a neoclassical theatre, had already been built in 1874, as neoclassical architecture spread into Brazil's northern cities. The Italian architect Giuseppe Antonio Landi, who arrived in Pará in 1753 as part of a technical commission and was persuaded to stay by Governor Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, had earlier reshaped the urban fabric. Landi redesigned the city's layout and modified or designed nearly every significant building of his era. He was born in 1713 and died in 1791, and the colonial streetscapes he influenced still survive in the older parts of the city.

• 4. The Círio de Nazaré

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  On the second Sunday of October each year, a farmer and lumberman named Plácido José de Souza is remembered across Pará. According to tradition, he found an image of the Virgin and Child on the edge of the Murucutu creek. Each time he carried the image home, it returned on its own to the spot where he found it. He built a small chapel on that edge instead. The Basilica of Our Lady of Nazareth of Exile stands there today. What began as a local act of devotion grew into the Círio de Nazaré, now regarded as the largest religious event in Brazil. The procession lasts around five hours, with thousands of people following the statue through the streets of Belém. Brazilians call it the Christmas of the Amazon because the entire city organizes itself around it. A rope tied to the carriage carrying the statue is held by the faithful throughout the march. The route ends at the Sé Cathedral. Before the main Sunday procession, the statue travels on a river pilgrimage through Guajará Bay aboard a Navy Corvette, escorted by dozens of boats, to honor those who work on the water and who regard the Virgin of Nazareth as their patron saint. A traditional contest awards the most originally decorated boat in the flotilla. The festivities extend across 15 days in total, closing with the Re-Círio procession.

• 5. City of Markets and Mango Trees

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  The Ver-o-Peso market, whose name means see the weight, was created in 1688 when the Portuguese imposed a tax on everything entering and leaving Amazonia. Today it covers the old port centre and brings together two thousand stalls selling medicinal herbs, regional fruits, meats, fish, arts and crafts, and seasonings. It sits near the old Mercado de Ferro, the iron market, on the quays along the waterfront. Nearby, the Estação das Docas Complex occupies restored warehouses built from prefabricated metal structures shipped from England at the beginning of the 20th century. The restoration opened 18,000 square meters of urbanized space along Guajará Bay with restaurants, a fluvial station, and two memorials. The Rodrigues Alves Wood-Botanical Garden was inspired by the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. Its 16 hectares along the busy Avenida Almirante Barroso contain 2,500 native species, an orchidary, lakes, and caverns. The garden holds squirrel monkeys, agoutis, and macaws in an urban setting. Belém has been part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the gastronomy category since 2015. Local cuisine draws heavily on Amerindian ingredients: the Cupuaçu fruit, with its distinctive sour smell, is pressed into juices, candies, jellies, and ice cream, while açaí, the purple palm fruit long prized by local communities, has in recent decades reached the national menu.

• 6. Amazon at the Doorstep

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  Marajó Island, the largest fluvial island in the world, lies directly across the Rio Pará from Belém. The Amazon rainforest the city borders is not a backdrop. It holds more than one-third of all species on Earth and represents more than half the planet's remaining rainforests. Wet tropical forests of the Americas are consistently more species-rich than equivalent forests in Africa and Asia. The municipality of Belém itself includes the island of Mosqueiro, fringed by 14 freshwater beaches, and the island of Caratateua. A third island, Tatuoca, houses one of only seven geophysical stations in the world and the only one in Latin America. The Utinga State Park, created in 1993, sits within the municipality and protects the metropolitan area's water supply. The park offers eight trails, the most popular being the monkey trail, a 40-minute walk from Bolonha lake to the visitor center. Electricity for the city comes from the Tucuruí Dam, about 300 kilometers southwest on the Tocantins River. The products moving through Belém's port today include aluminium, iron ore, Brazil nuts, pineapples, cassava, jute, and hardwoods. Japanese immigration after the 1930s was a significant factor in developing jute and black pepper cultivation, particularly at Tomé-Açu, just south of the city.