Marajo Island

Marajo sits in the mouth of the Amazon and covers about forty thousand square kilometres, roughly the size of Switzerland - flat, half savanna and half forest, and inundated across much of its area during the wet season. Water buffalo define it: brought in the nineteenth century, they now number in the hundreds of thousands, outnumber the people, work as draught animals, supply the milk for Marajo cheese, and are ridden by the police at Soure, which is not a tourist stunt but the practical way to cross flooded ground. The island also carries the Marajoara archaeological tradition - elaborate painted and incised funerary ceramics from a complex society that occupied it for centuries before European arrival.

History

From about 400 BC to 1600 AD the island was home to the Marajoara culture, which archaeologists divide into phases from the Ananatuba to the Aruã; Betty Meggers, working in the 1940s and 1950s, held that it was founded by migrants from the Andes and declined on poor soils, but Anna Roosevelt, excavating again in the 1980s, argued that it grew up within the Amazon, with intensive farming, large public works and perhaps more than 100,000 people. The arrival of Europeans in the 16th century was catastrophic, with some 90% of the people dying of diseases to which they had no immunity, yet in the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 Marajó was the only large populated area with no recorded case (Wikipedia, Marajó).

What you'll find

• An island the size of Switzerland - the largest in the Amazon delta, part river and part sea.
• Buffalo everywhere - outnumbering people, worked, milked and ridden by the police.
• Marajoara ceramics - the painted funerary pottery of the pre-Columbian society.
• Seasonal flooding - much of the savanna under water for half the year.

When to go

July to December, the drier half. Three days.

Before you go

The ferry from Belem takes three to four hours and schedules are limited. Roads on the island are dirt and become difficult in the wet. Beaches are river beaches with brown water, not the Caribbean.

Nearby

Belem and the Ver-o-Peso market are across the bay; Algodoal is east along the coast.

Key facts