An Amazon-mouth island as large as Switzerland
Marajó, the chief island of Brazil’s Marajó Archipelago in Pará, covers about 40,100 square kilometres—roughly Switzerland’s size—spanning up to 295 by 200 kilometres at the Amazon’s mouth. Pre-Cabraline Marajoara society may have topped 100,000 people between about 400 BC and 1600 AD.
Channels, bays, and the Atlantic fence it from the mainland: Vieira Grande Bay and the Amazon Delta’s South Canal to the north, Pará and Tocantins headwaters south, Jacaré Grande and Companhia rivers plus furos west. Helen Palmatary likened the island to an egg in a snake’s mouth. With neighbouring islets the archipelago totals 49,602 square kilometres inside a 59,985-square-kilometre environmental protection area created in 1989.
Almost flat, the east holds savanna plains near six metres elevation while the west is rainforest near sea level. Domestic water buffalo—technically invasive—now number about 450,000 on the fazendas. Pororoca tidal bores can build four-metre surfing waves. Lake Arari covers 400 square kilometres yet shrinks by eighty percent in the dry season as rains and river stages turn much of the island into a temporary inland sea.
Mondongo palm swamps of buriti and açaí flood a metre deep in the wet season north of the savanna. Soure, Salvaterra, and Breves anchor the southeast tourist coast; a ferry from Belém reaches Soure. Seasonally flooded várzea forest defines the ecoregion. Because the water rises and falls so sharply, many settlements stand on stilts; Afuá, where boats replace streets, is nicknamed the Venice of Marajó. The Tartarugas Canal already links Lake Arari to the Atlantic, but schemes floated since the 1980s to join the Anajás and Atuá rivers for Belém–Macapá traffic have never been built.
Its human past is fiercely argued. Betty Meggers, digging in the 1940s and 1950s, claimed the Marajoara were Andean migrants who withered on poor soil until a collapse around 1400. Anna Roosevelt, excavating again in the 1980s, rejected that view: she saw a home-grown Amazonian society with intensive farming, public works, matrilineal clans and tamped-earth houses. European contact in the sixteenth century killed about nine in ten islanders through disease, yet during the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic Marajó recorded no cases at all.
Source: Marajó
