Manaus

city · earth

The capital of Amazonas state and the largest city in the Amazon basin, sitting on the left bank of the Rio Negro near its confluence with the Solimoes. Founded as a river fort in the seventeenth century, it became the administrative and financial centre of the rubber boom, which paid for the Teatro Amazonas opera house completed in the 1890s and collapsed within two decades once Hevea seedlings taken to Southeast Asia began producing. A 1960s free-trade-zone policy rebuilt it as an industrial city, and it now holds a metropolitan population of roughly two million people in the middle of the forest. For this Journey its most important asset is unglamorous: the Rio Negro gauge at the port has been read since the opening years of the twentieth century, giving the basin its longest continuous instrumental record of water level. Every claim that a drought is "the worst on record" is a claim about that gauge.