The Amazon River: From A To Z

The Amazon: From A To Z
Published: 18 June 2007
by Michael McCarthy
Independent UK

Brazilian scientists claim a new survey proves their great river is the world's longest - beating the Nile. Michael McCarthy embarks on an alphabetical tour from source to sea.

A is for Anaconda

The world's biggest snake, fatter and heavier than the python, is one of the Amazon's emblematic wildlife species. Dwelling in the river, the green anaconda can be 30ft long and weigh more than 500lb; there are accounts of gigantic specimens far bigger than this, but they are not generally believed. It crushes its prey like a boa constrictor.

B is for Belem

The gateway to the Amazon, this port city of 1.5 million people near the river's mouth is capital of the state of Para.

C is for Caiman

The Amazon's version of the crocodile, the black caiman is more than 12ft long and can be dangerous to humans. The Brazilians call it the jacaré and river people sometimes hunt it for food. (It is supposed to taste like chicken.)

D is for Dolphin

The Amazon has its own freshwater dolphin species, theboto which is about 8ft long and sometimes coloured bright pink. Although several of the world's river dolphin species are critically endangered the boto is thought to be fairly secure.

E is for the Encontro das Aguas

The "meeting of the waters" downstream of Manaus, where the two great rivers, the Rio Negro (with black water) and the Solimoes (with red-brown water), join to form the Amazon proper. The different-coloured streams flow side-by-side for many miles without mixing, and are a major tourist attraction; a boat trip there is a good location to glimpse the boto (see Dolphin).

F is for Fish

The Amazon's fish are among the world's most remarkable. Some are fearsome, such as the piranha (see below), the electric eel, which can give a powerful shock, and several species of freshwater stingray, but others are enormous food species, especially the so-called "royal" fish of the Amazon, such as the tambaqui and the pirarucu, which can grow to 400lb and more.

G is for the Greatest Rainforest

The river flows through and drains the world's largest remaining tract of rainforest, more than three million square miles in extent.

H is for Horizon

At the meeting of the waters (see Encontro das Aguas) the Amazon is so vast it stretches, uniquely, to an empty horizon of water.

I is for Iquitos

The Amazon's third major city, with more than 350,000 people deep in the Peruvian jungle - the largest city in the world that cannot be reached by road, only by air or river transport.

J is for Jaguar

The major big-cat predator of the river basin (onça in Portuguese), it does not need to take its prey into a tree like its African relative the leopard as it has no enemies bigger than itself.

K is for Kingfisher

The beautiful Amazon kingfisher Chloroceryle amazona is one of many hundreds of bird species to be found along the river's banks.

L is for Longest

There is a long-running dispute over whether the Amazon or the Nile is the world's longest river. Different geographers give different lengths - it depends on definitions - although both are about 4,000 miles long.

M is for Manaus

This is the chief city of the Amazon, a port of 2 million people on the Rio Negro just before its junction with the Solimoes, more than 900 miles from the sea. It prospered greatly during the rubber boom in the last decades of the 19th century: its rubber barons demonstrated their wealth by building their famous opera house, the Teatro Amazonas, in 1896. They imported all the stone, and the great tenor Caruso and the actress Sarah Bernhardt were also imported, for performances.

The city declined when the rubber boom ended after the First World War. It is now a financial and eco-tourism centre.

N is for Navigation

Large ocean-going ships can sail up the river as far as Manaus (930 miles); smaller vessels of up to 3,000 tonnes can reach Iquitos in Peru, 2,240 miles from the sea, and the furthest point up the course of any river in the world that is served by sea-going vessels. However, medium-sized riverboats can ascend another 485 miles to Achual Point.

O is for Other Countries

Although we tend to think of the Amazon as a Brazilian river, it flows through Peru and drains river basins in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela.

P is for Piranha

Only small - typically six inches long - but looming large in the folklore of the river as the fish that will shred you with their razor-sharp teeth in a feeding frenzy, should you fall in. On occasion they will, but it doesn't often happen.

R is for Rubber

The great native product of the river basin (the latex from the rubber tree Hevea brasiliensis) which was the centre of a huge industrial boom on the river, after the invention of the rubber tyre, from 1880 to 1914 - when Asian rubber plantations began to take over.

S is for Source

The Amazon's principal headstreams, the Marañón and the Ucayali, rise in the Peruvian Andes. The location of the actual source on the slopes of 18,000ft-high Nevado Mismi in southern Peru, 3,900 miles from the sea, was first put forward by a National Geographic Expedition in 1971.

T is for Tributaries

The Amazon has more than 1,100, 11 of which are more than 1,000 miles long, including the Madeira, the Tocantins and the Xingu.

U is for Unexplored

Even today, much of the vast basin of the upper river remains unknown territory. A curious fact: there is no bridge over the Amazon, throughout its entire length.

V is for Volume of Water

The criterion by which the Amazon is incomparably the world's biggest river. Every second it discharges about 95,000 cubic metres (or 3,3million cubic feet) of fresh water into the Atlantic.

W is for Wildlife-Richness

The river holds at least 2,000 species of fish, with many not yet properly categorised, and many more still to be discovered. The surrounding forest contains tens of thousands of species of trees and flowering plants, birds, mammals and reptiles; the unknown insect species may run into millions.

X is for Xingu

The most mysterious of the tributaries, flowing for 1,300 miles through the territories of many Indian tribes. The British explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett disappeared on the river with his son Jack and Jack's friend, Raleigh Rimmel, in 1925, while on an expedition to find a lost jungle city. Despite claims to the contrary, no undisputed trace of the men has ever been found.

Y is for Yellow Fever

The biggest hazard for early Amazon explorers, such as Alfred Russell Wallace (who discovered the theory of Natural Selection at the same time as Charles Darwin). Wallace's brother Herbert Edward, who went out to join him in his insect-collecting business, died of the disease in Belem in 1851.

Z is for Zoological Horror

Forget anacondas, caimans and piranhas. What you really don't want to encounter in the Amazon is the candiru or toothpick fish, Vandellia cirrhosa, a tiny, translucent catfish which will swim into the penis of naked male bathers - truly - and lodge with its spines itself in the urethra, from where only surgery can remove it.

If the Amazon is a river of dreams, this is the nightmare.