The Amazon outflows every rival; length still sparks fights
South America’s Amazon leads the planet in discharge—about 215,000 to 230,000 cubic metres per second, more than the next seven independent rivers combined—while scholars still argue whether it or the Nile is longest. Peruvian headwater debates keep the tape measure busy.
For decades Nevado Mismi’s Apurímac source held the farthest-source crown until a 2014 study pointed to Mantaro headwaters on Cordillera Rumi Cruz; those streams join others to form the main stem. Two of the world’s top ten discharge rivers are themselves Amazon tributaries.
Europeans first called much of it Marañón—a name Peru still uses—before Rio Amazonas spread in Spanish and Portuguese, again tied to Orellana’s memory of women warriors resembling mythic Amazons.
For millions of years the river ran the other way, from east to west, until the rising Andes blocked its path to the Pacific and swung it toward the Atlantic. It now delivers roughly a fifth of all river water reaching the oceans. In March 1500 Vicente Yáñez Pinzón became the first documented European to sail up it, calling it Mar Dulce, sweet sea, for the fresh water pushing out from its mouth. Orellana, split off from Gonzalo Pizarro's hunt for El Dorado and cinnamon, reached that mouth on 24 August 1542.
Shell mounds dated mainly between 7500 and 4000 BC are the oldest signs of settlement, and archaeologists reckon more than 3 million people lived along the river when Orellana passed through. Pedro Teixeira was the first European to go up the entire river, reaching Quito in 1637. Scientific exploration followed, from La Condamine in 1743 to Bates and Wallace between 1848 and 1859. The Cabanagem revolt of 1835 to 1840 killed an estimated 30 to 40 per cent of Grão-Pará's people.
Source: Amazon River
