Around 700km west of Belem - but
closer to 800 as the river flows -
Santarem
is the first significant stop on the
journey up the Amazon, a small city
of around 130,000 people, which
still makes it the fourth largest in
the Brazilian Amazon. It is a
pleasant, rather sleepy place which
feels more like a large town than a
city - a world away from the bustle
of Belem and Manaus. But don't be
deceived by its languid atmosphere,
there are plenty of things to do
here, and Santarem, positioned
right in the centre of the area
often referred to as the middle
Amazon, a region still largely (and
inexplicably) unvisited by tourists,
is the perfect base for exploring
some of the most beautiful river
scenery the Amazon basin has to
offer.
It is likely that this area once
supported one of the highest
populations in the Americas before
Europeans arrived, with towns and
villages stretching for miles along
the riverbanks, living off the rich
stocks of fish in the river, and
farming corn on even richer alluvial
soils, replenished annually when the
Amazon flooded. On all the
distinctive flat-topped hills around
Santarem, there is evidence of prehistoric
Indian occupation , easily
identified by the terra preta do
Indio (Indian black soil), a
black compost deliberately built up
over the generations by Indian
farmers. If you do any walking up
and down these hills, especially
around Belterra, keep your eyes open
for ceramic shards. In recent years,
thanks to the work of an American
archeologist, Anna Roosevelt, it has
become clear that Santarem and its
surrounding area is one of the most
important archeological sites in the
Americas.
Thirty kilometres east of Santarem,
more easily accessible by river than
by road, is a nineteenth-century
sugar plantation called Taperinha
. In an excavation there in 1991,
Roosevelt unearthed decorated
pottery almost 10,000 years old
- twice as old as the oldest
ceramics found anywhere in the
Americas. This suggests that the
Amazon basin was settled before the
Andes, and that the Americas had
been settled much earlier than
previously thought. Later
excavations in Monte Alegre
confirmed that the middle Amazon
played an important role in the
prehistory of the Americas with cave
and rock paintings dotting the
surrounding hills also being dated
at around 10,000 years old. About
two thousand years ago, Indian
culture in the region entered a
particularly dynamic phase,
producing some superbly decorated
ceramics comparable in their
sophistication with Andean crafts;
there are beautiful pieces of Santarem-phase
pottery in the small museum in
Santarem, and even more in the
Museu Goeldi in Belem.
The very first European accounts
of the middle Amazon, dating from
the early sixteenth century, which
talk of swarms of canoes coming out
to do battle and of Indian long
houses lining the riverbanks, are
probably true. The river asssumed
its current lightly populated look
in the centuries after first
contact, as disease and slavery
wiped out the Indians or drove them
way upriver; as late as 1960 some
two hundred Indians were massacred
by settlers on a sandbank just south
of Itaituba.
The city
By far the most interesting place in
Santarem, at any hour of the day or
night, is the waterfront . There are
always dozens of boats tied up, with
the accompanying bustle of people
and cargoes being loaded and
unloaded, and constant activity
in...
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Beaches
Unlike the eastern and western
reaches of the Amazon, the region
around Santarem has a very distinct
dry season , stretching from June to
December. In the dry season, Santarem
and its surroundings get extremely
hot, even by Brazilian standards,...
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