Rubber-boom capital in the heart of the Amazon
Manaus, capital of Brazil’s Amazonas state, ranks as the country’s seventh-largest city with about 2,279,686 people estimated for 2024 across roughly 11,401 km². Founded in 1669 as Fort São José do Rio Negro, it took the Manaós people’s name as a town in 1832 and city rank in 1848.
The city lies in the middle of the Amazon rainforest and hosts the National Institute of Amazonian Research, the region's leading centre for scientific study. Just east of it, the Solimões and Negro rivers meet to form what Brazilians call the Amazon. Its name comes from the Manaós people, and is said to mean Mother of the Gods.
To secure the region, the Portuguese built a fort named for São José at the Rio Negro bar in 1668–1669. Missionaries built a chapel to Our Lady of the Conception in 1695, and she became the city's patron saint. The Cabanagem revolt of 1835, in which Black, Indigenous and mixed-race rebels seized power from the white elite, shrank Grão-Pará's population by roughly 40,000, to about 60,000.
In the late nineteenth century rubber made Manaus the richest city in South America and earned it the nickname Paris of the Tropics; the historian Robin Furneaux wrote that no extravagance deterred the rubber barons. The boom brought electricity, but it collapsed once rubber seeds were smuggled out and planted in Southeast Asia, and the city sank into poverty. Under the military government a free trade zone opened in 1967 to fill the interior.
Manaus hosted matches at the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the only host city in the rainforest. An estimated 76 percent of residents caught COVID-19 before a second wave in January 2021. The city is densely built with few green spaces; the largest include Mindu Park, opened in 1989, a 95-hectare refuge created in 1982 for endangered pied tamarins, and the 100-square-kilometre Adolfo Ducke Forest Reserve, set up in 1963 and run by the research institute.
Source: Manaus
