Tefé

Lake Tefé was home to Indigenous peoples long before the Portuguese arrived; as early as 1620 Carmelite missionaries counted converts among the Mura who lived around the lake. Tefé, long known as Ega, was the fourth of eight aldeias, or mission villages, the Carmelites founded along the Solimões and the Rio Negro between 1697 and 1751. The mission, Parauarí, began on an island across the lake and was moved to the present site after a smallpox outbreak in the early 18th century.

In 1759 the commandant Joaquim de Mello da Povoas turned the mission into a town and named it Ega. In the 1850s the English naturalist Henry Walter Bates made it a base for his collecting and described its mixed society of Indigenous people and settlers in The Naturalist on the River Amazons. It became a city named Tefé in 1855, and in 1910 priests of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit founded the church prelature that is still based here.

Tefé grew into the commercial centre of the middle Solimões. In 1999 the Mamirauá Institute was established here, building on research into the uakari monkeys of the nearby várzea, and the town became the base for the reserves of Mamirauá and Amanã. In September 2023, during a severe drought, about 150 river dolphins — pink dolphins and tucuxis — died in Lake Tefé as the water level fell and its temperature reached record highs of around 40°C.

Tefé is a town of river people, the caboclos and ribeirinhos of mixed Indigenous and Portuguese descent, alongside Indigenous communities and migrants from elsewhere in Brazil. Most people are Catholic, with a large Protestant minority, and the town is the seat of the Territorial Prelature of Tefé.

Science gives the town an unusual character for its size. The Mamirauá Institute brought researchers to the town, and its model of community management — fishing quotas for pirarucu, managed forestry and community-run tourism — has made the reserves' river communities partners in conservation rather than only its subjects.

Life is lived on the water. People of Tefé travel by boat as others take a bus, and everything from fruit and furniture to television aerials arrives by river. The rise and fall of the water sets the calendar for fishing, farming on the floodplain and travel, and a drought year like 2023 is felt in every household.

The municipality had about 59,000 people in 2021, by the estimate of the Brazilian statistics institute IBGE, making it the eighth most populous in Amazonas. Its territory of about 23,700 square kilometres is mostly forest and water, and nearly half of the Tefé National Forest lies within it.

The town is the largest commercial centre of the middle Solimões, with strong economic influence over towns up and down the river, and public services, the church and the research institutes are based here. In the small river communities around it, farming, fishing and forest products are the main livelihoods.

Isolation shapes everything: there are no roads out, so goods are expensive and travel depends on boats and a few flights. Droughts have become a pressing concern. In 2023 the lake fell sharply and overheated, river dolphins died in large numbers, and low water made boat traffic difficult; the region's rivers fell to record lows again in 2024.

The diet of Tefé is the diet of the Solimões. River fish comes first: tambaqui grilled over charcoal, pirarucu, which communities in the reserves fish under managed quotas, and smaller everyday fish fried and served with rice, beans and farinha. Nearby Uarini, where cassava growing is the main economic activity, gives its name to its own farinha.

Tacacá, the hot sour soup of tucupi broth, tapioca gum, dried shrimp and lip-numbing jambu leaves, is sold in the afternoon, and many breakfasts are built on tapioca pancakes, manioc and coffee. Carne de sol, the sun-cured salted beef of north-eastern Brazil, is served here as in restaurants across the country.

Fruit comes from the floodplain farms and forest: açaí, cupuaçu, bacaba and camu-camu turn up as juices and desserts, and Brazil nuts are gathered in the forest. Guaraná is the everyday soft drink, and coffee, strong and sweet, punctuates the day in homes and at the port.