Iquitos and the Amazon

Iquitos is a city of several hundred thousand people that no road reaches. You arrive by air or you arrive by river, and that isolation has shaped everything about it. It grew rich on the rubber boom around 1900, which paid for tiled mansions, an iron building attributed to the Eiffel workshop and an opera-house ambition that the bust ended abruptly. Today it is the gateway to the Peruvian Amazon: the port district of Belén sits on stilts and floats through the high-water season, and boats leave for lodges and for the Pacaya-Samiria reserve, a vast flooded forest of oxbow lakes, pink river dolphins and hoatzin. The river itself is the reason to come, and how much of it you see depends entirely on how far upstream you are willing to travel.

What's there

• Belén market and the floating quarter - a working river market on stilts, at its most striking at high water.
• Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve - flooded forest, oxbow lakes and wildlife, several days upstream.
• Rubber-boom architecture - tiled facades along the Malecón from the city's brief fortune.
• Pink river dolphins - regularly seen where tributaries meet the main channel.

When to go

High water from December to May floods the forest and lets boats travel among the treetops; low water from June to November exposes beaches and concentrates wildlife on the riverbanks. Neither is better, but they are different trips and worth choosing deliberately.

Before you go

The wildlife you see depends almost entirely on distance from the city; lodges an hour from Iquitos offer a pleasant river stay rather than a wilderness one. Some operators keep captive animals for photographs, which is worth refusing. Heat and humidity are constant and insects are relentless.

Nearby

The Nauta road runs to the Marañón; upstream the Amazon continues to the Colombian and Brazilian borders.