Manaus

The city began as a Portuguese fort, São José da Barra do Rio Negro, built in 1668–69 near the mouth of the Rio Negro to secure the river against the Dutch. Indigenous people who helped to build the fort settled around it; it became a town in 1832 under the name Manaus, taken from the Manaós people, was raised to a city in 1848 as Cidade da Barra do Rio Negro, and took back the name Manaus in 1856.

In the late 19th century it stood at the centre of the Amazon rubber boom. Rubber made Manaus the richest city in South America and earned it the name "Paris of the Tropics": the rubber barons spent extravagantly, the city gained electric trams and street lighting, and the Teatro Amazonas, the iron market modelled on Les Halles and the Palace of Justice were built in these years. The boom ended abruptly once rubber seeds taken out of the Amazon grew on plantations in South-East Asia; many people left, the city could not generate electricity for years, and it fell into poverty.

Revival came with the free trade zone created in 1967, whose tax incentives drew factories and new investment and pushed the population past a million by 1990. The city was hit very hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, with a second wave from January 2021 driven by a new variant. In 2014 it hosted World Cup matches in the new Arena da Amazônia, and in July 2026 the Teatro Amazonas was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with Belém's Teatro da Paz.

The rubber-boom taste for opera has survived. The Teatro Amazonas is home to the Amazonas Philharmonic and stages the annual Amazonas Opera Festival, and the city also holds theatre, jazz and film seasons through the year. The Largo de São Sebastião in front of the opera house, with its monument and historic buildings, is a gathering place in the evening.

The strongest popular tradition is Boi-Bumbá, the music and dance of the bull drama. Its great stage is the Parintins festival, downstream on the Amazon at the end of June, when the red Garantido and blue Caprichoso compete over three nights; Manaus follows it closely and holds its own Boi Manaus around the city's anniversary in October. June also brings the Amazonas Folklore Festival, ending in a river procession for São Pedro, and Carnival is celebrated here as across Brazil.

Manaus is a meeting place of Indigenous, caboclo river people, migrants from the north-east and newcomers drawn by the factories, and its name honours the Manaós. INPA and the forest reserve on the city's edge make it a major centre of Amazon science, and the rivers frame everything: boats are part of daily life, weekends are spent at river beaches when the water falls, and the city's people, the manauaras, mark the year by the rise and fall of the Rio Negro.

Manaus had an estimated 2.28 million people in 2024, making it the seventh-largest city in Brazil, and its metropolitan region has more than 2.8 million. The municipality covers a huge area, much of it forest, and the built-up city spreads north and east from the old centre on the river. The 2022 census found more than half the population living in urban communities and favelas, and only a minority of the city connected to sewers.

The free trade zone is the economic engine: its factories make electronics, including mobile phones, under tax incentives, and the airport is one of Brazil's busiest for freight. The port remains the hub of the upper Amazon, where boats load goods and passengers for towns days away by river, and tourism to the forest adds to the economy.

Life follows the heat and the water. Mornings start early, the afternoon is for staying out of the sun, and evenings bring people out to the squares, the Ponta Negra promenade and the shopping centres. The rivers set the rhythm of the year as well: the drought of 2023 lowered the rivers so far that it hampered the transport of goods and passengers.

River fish is the base of the diet. Tambaqui, a fruit-eating fish, is served as thick ribs; pirarucu, one of the largest freshwater fish in the world, is eaten fresh or salted; and jaraqui, eaten in great quantity across the state, is an everyday fish, eaten with farinha, manioc flour. A local saying holds that whoever eats jaraqui never leaves, and in March 2026 the state assembly approved a law making the fish part of the intangible cultural heritage of Amazonas.

Tacacá is a soup of northern Brazil: tucupi broth made from manioc, gummy tapioca, dried shrimp and jambu, a plant that numbs the lips, served hot in a gourd bowl. Another local speciality is the x-caboquinho, a sandwich filled with tucumã palm fruit, cheese and fried banana.

Fruit is everywhere at the markets around the port, above all the Adolpho Lisboa and the busier Feira da Banana beside it: cupuaçu, with its tangy pulp used in juices, creams and sweets; açaí; and Brazil nuts. Guaraná is drunk as a soft drink, as across Brazil.