Manaus: Industry, Elegant Buildings & The Meeting Of The Waters

“A couple of Englishmen strolling through Brazil, end-to-end, wonderful, friendly, even without speaking Portuguese always sought to enjoy everything in the city”.

These words are, unaltered, the review of us placed on airbnb by one of our hosts in Brazil. It pleased us so much that we just wanted to reproduce it here.

As if this whole thing didn’t feel strange enough already, we’re finally getting undressed and into bed when the cockerels start crowing to remind us that daylight is only a couple of hours away. Half past ten in the evening seems an odd time for a domestic flight to take to the air, particularly a 4-hour flight which crosses a time line and means it’s 1:30am local time as we touch down at Manaus. Thankfully the arrivals system is quick, taxis are plentiful and we’re checking in at the hotel just 50 minutes later. And then it’s cockerel time.

Manaus is at first impression a downtrodden town, unpleasant smells at almost every turn amid a network of scruffy shopping streets, but this is a notion which we soon dispel as we start to uncover the city’s appeal. Before we do that, we watch the infamous Amazon ferries leaving port, belching black diesel fumes into the air, hulls rusting and in some cases listing to one side. They look both unsafe and overcrowded (hello Maggie & Richard, we remember your awful journey very clearly!).

Away from the scruffy downtown district, Manaus is home to an impressive collection of elegant buildings, several atmospheric plazas and a music scene which is as lively and eclectic as Copacabana. Yet that’s not all that we will come to like about this city. In the 24 hours we have here before we head out into the jungle (see our last post) our affection for the place grows considerably and we look forward to our return.

When we do return after our four days in the jungle, the notorious rains of Manaus have been banished by glorious hot sunshine and deep azure skies and even the humidity factor seems to have been usurped by dry, bone warming heat, feeling more Mediterranean than tropical. 

Pride of place in the elegant buildings of Manaus surely goes to the Teatro Amazonas, a wonderfully opulent creation which dominates its own square, the Largo São Sebastian. The theatre is the grandest of places which oozes old world class and charm from its every stone and every curving balustrade. Airing its first opera in January 1897, this magnificent building incorporates marble from Italy, furnishings from France and even steelwork from Glasgow. The interior, which unfortunately we don’t get to see, boasts no less than 198 chandeliers made exclusively from Murano glass. 

The huge dome atop the theatre comprises 36,000 tiles in the colours of the Brazilian flag, capping the pink wedding cake which is the grand theatre itself. Like much of Manaus’s elegance, it owes its opulence to the riches of the rubber export trade – a little more of that later. That square, the Largo São Sebastian, is a delightful place flanked by an assortment of bars and restaurants, its centre of decorative tiles frequented nightly by families and young lovers enjoying the cooler evening air in a joyful yet relaxing atmosphere.

But it’s not just the elegant quarters of Manaus which have won us over: this is a fascinatingly industrial and industrious city in which the manic activity of its citizens is as enthralling as any of its splendour. Down by the waterfront is the Fiera da Banana, a thriving, bustling fruit market full of sound and colour and the sweet fragrances of ripe fruit – but this is more than just a market, this is also a distribution centre where road turns to river and produce travels out to the world.

Behind the market is another section of the port where a large fleet of oddly shaped boats are loaded with fruit, flour, tapioca, plastic piping, metal sheets and bags of cement and almost anything else you can think of, including passengers on hammocks slung on deck in amongst the cargo. Men rush in every direction with bags on shoulders, sackbarrows filled with produce, crates of beer loaded on weighed-down trolleys, building materials on creaking pallets. Busy cities like Manaus, where industrious life goes on at a relentless pace, have a gritty appeal all of their own, and this is all so engaging to witness.

Before we leave Manaus we must mention the Palacio da Rio Negro, another opulent building owing its existence to the golden age of rubber exports, and in particular to one Karl Waldemar Scholz, a man who enjoyed and endured both good and bad fortune in life, and that’s putting it mildly. A German citizen initially employed in the Austrian consulate, Scholz amassed huge wealth through export of rubber and became a leading light in Manaus society, philanthropically donating funds to local causes and building for him and his wife the magnificent palace which was to be their home.

Scholz, a lover of both birds and horses, commenced a collection of both at his fabulous home, only for an adopted heron to peck out his eye. He was then thrown from one of his horses and in the process sustained life changing injuries calling for a lengthy spell of hospitalisation. The path towards the first World War coincided with the decline of the rubber trade, and so Scholz’s finances became more and more stretched until he was forced to mortgage the palace and return home to Germany in 1913. Unable to keep up repayments, he surrendered ownership of the palace and was soon declared bankrupt in his home country. As if this lot wasn’t enough for one man, Scholz then developed, and died from, throat cancer. Talk about life unravelling!

There is one excursion left before we leave Manaus and indeed move on from Brazil, to see yet another amazing natural phenomenon. We have seen many fabulous sights on our travels but the “encontro das Aguas”, the meeting of the waters, is surely right up there.

It is just outside Manaus that the two mighty rivers of Rio Negro and the Amazon converge – but this is no ordinary confluence and is an incredible thing to see. Here, the Amazon has travelled nearly 4,000 miles from its source, the Negro some 1,400, between them shifting more than 3 billion gallons of water per minute ever seaward through the Amazona region. The waters of the Negro are black, those of the Amazon a tea-coloured brown; the Negro waters are significantly warmer – by 10 degrees F – than those of the Amazon, and the Amazon flows at a much faster speed (6km per hour versus 2km per hour).

The result is that, amazingly, the mighty rivers join but cannot immediately combine, and flow side by side with a definite demarcation between the two, for a considerable distance. It takes a full 6 kilometres for the speed and temperatures to merge, and for that full length the rivers flow stubbornly side by side, brown on black, warm on cold. We have never seen anything remotely like this anywhere on Earth. Amazing.

It’s our last day in Manaus, the last day of our Brazil adventure. The Mediterranean heat of yesterday has subsided and the humidity has raced back up the scale: dark clouds gather and the threat of one last giant thunderstorm looms over the bustling city as we prepare for the long journey ahead.

Brazil has given us some wonderful experiences all the way from the madness of Rio to the extremes of the Amazon via the peace of Paraty and the drama of Iguazu. It’s been so exciting and stimulating that a return to South America is already on the drawing board. We will be back.

For now, with those skies darkening and one last meal in Largo São Sebastian on the horizon, we are packing our bags for Louisiana.

A long journey of twenty-one hours and three flights lies ahead. Next stop New Orleans.