Santarém

Long before Europeans arrived, the land at the mouth of the Tapajós was home to the Tapajó people, who gave the river its name and left a distinctive archaeological culture, known as the Santarém or Tapajônica culture and noted above all for its pottery. The first written mention of their settlement dates from 1542, when Francisco de Orellana's expedition raided one of their maize fields on its way down the Amazon.

Jesuit missionaries arrived in the following century, and on 22 June 1661 Father João Filipe Bettendorff founded the mission village of Aldeia do Tapajós on the site; the Jesuits also founded other villages nearby, including the one that became Alter do Chão. A fortress, the Fortaleza do Tapajós, became the nucleus of the growing town. In 1758 it was raised to the status of a vila and renamed Santarém after the Portuguese city, and in 1848 it became a city. During the Cabanagem revolt of 1835 the local authorities moved to repress the rebels who had taken Belém.

The town's fortunes have followed a series of economic cycles — rubber, coffee, then a gold rush whose decline from the late 1980s was followed by a fall in the city's population in the late 1990s. Since 2000 it has grown again, and a private port beside the docks now ships soya from the expanding farmland of the region abroad. Proposals to divide Pará have named Santarém as the capital of a new state of Tapajós.

Santarém's culture blends Indigenous, Portuguese and caboclo river traditions. The pottery of the ancient Tapajó culture is a point of local pride and part of what the city offers visitors, and the religious calendar is marked above all by the Círio of Our Lady of the Conception, the largest religious festival in western Pará, which drew some 200,000 faithful in 2017.

The great popular festival is the Sairé, held every September in Alter do Chão. It mixes Catholic processions with local music and the dramatised legends of the Amazon, above all the boto, the river dolphin said to seduce young women, and ends with a contest between two groups, the pink boto and the tucuxi, with costumes, floats and songs in the spirit of the Parintins festival. The Sairé itself goes back to the Jesuit missions of the 17th century and is regarded as the most traditional popular festival of the Amazon.

Life is closely tied to the rivers. People from the riverside communities come into the city by boat to sell fish and produce and to use its hospitals and schools, and the composer Wilson Fonseca, born in Santarém, is honoured in the name of the airport. Evenings on the orla, watching the sun set over the Tapajós, are part of the town's routine.

The municipality had an estimated population of about 360,000 in 2025, according to the national statistics institute IBGE, making it the third most populous in Pará. It leads a small metropolitan area with Belterra and Mojuí dos Campos, and its districts include Alter do Chão and many communities reached only by water. Between 1980 and 2000 many people moved in from the countryside, drawn by better infrastructure, health care and schools.

The economy rests on commerce and services for the whole of western Pará, on the river port and on agriculture: the municipality is among the state's main producers of rice, soya and manioc, and the soya terminal on the waterfront is a visible sign of the farm frontier. Tourism, concentrated on Alter do Chão, brings visitors from Brazil and abroad. Studies of the waterfront have recorded a sharp loss of natural shoreline as port terminals have expanded.

The rhythm of the year follows the river. In the rainy months the water rises, flooding low land and covering the beaches; as it falls from about August, the sandbars reappear and the weekends move to the beaches. Boats come and go at all hours from the small port near Praça Tiradentes.

Santarém eats from the river. Its markets sell tambaqui, tucunaré, pirarucu and surubim, and the fish is grilled, fried, cooked in caldeirada, a fish stew, or served as pirarucu in escabeche. Farofa de piracuí — toasted flour made from dried, ground fish — is a local speciality, often eaten with banana.

The dishes of Pará are found here too: tacacá, the hot tucupi and shrimp soup with jambu, pato no tucupi and maniçoba, along with cakes made from macaxeira, the sweet variety of manioc. Açaí is drunk as well, along with juices of fruits such as cupuaçu and graviola.

Amazon fruits turn up in juices and desserts, from cupuaçu cream and cupuaçu bonbons to biscuits made with Brazil nuts. In Alter do Chão, simple restaurants and beach shacks serve grilled river fish and cold beer beside the water when the beaches are exposed. The markets in town are the best place to see the range of fish, flours and fruit that reach Santarém by boat from the communities along the two rivers, and many visitors eat their best fish at the simplest places.