Iracema / Jacaré-Tinga — Amazon Traditional Riverboat

Location: Rua da Índia, Santarém, 68000-000, Brasil, Santarém / Manaus, Brazil

A traditional wooden-hulled Amazon riverboat — built in Manaus in the 1980s in the hand-crafted ribeiro tradition — navigating várzea flooded forest and indigenous Aldeia Tucano communities on the Amazon's black-water tributaries, places where the river is the only road and the only culture

The Amazon is not a river. It is an inland sea — 6.7 million square kilometres of drainage basin — and its traditional wooden riverboats are the vessels that have carried this civilisation for centuries. The Iracema, built in Manaus in the 1980s with hand-crafted hull panels, is one of the last traditional wooden-hulled Amazon charter vessels, navigating várzea flooded forest on the black-water tributaries where the only road is the water itself. Voyages include visits to Aldeia Tucano indigenous communities, where river culture, forest medicine and ancestral boat knowledge still constitute daily life. The Amazon riverboat tradition is the world's largest freshwater maritime civilisation, and almost no one outside Brazil knows it exists.

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