Belem Audio Tours

Belem was founded in 1616 by the Portuguese captain Francisco Caldeira Castelo Branco, a strategic fortification 100 kilometers from the Atlantic on the Guajara River, the southernmost arm of the Amazon delta. It was the first European foothold on the Amazon and for centuries controlled everything that came down the river or tried to go up it. The rubber boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries made it fabulously wealthy: the Theatro da Paz, opened in 1874 in Italian neoclassical style with a Carrara marble interior, was built on rubber money and still performs opera today. The wealth collapsed with the rubber price, but the architecture and the Ver-o-Peso market, operating on the waterfront since the 17th century, remained.

Ver-o-Peso translates as 'see the weight' and refers to the colonial tax-collection point where goods coming off the river were weighed and taxed.

Today it is one of the largest open-air markets in Latin America, spreading across the waterfront in a chaos of fish stalls, Amazonian fruit, herbal medicine, and ceramics. The fish you will see include species you have never encountered anywhere else: jaraqui, tambaqui, pirarucu, tucunare, each one pulled from a river system that contains more species than the entire Atlantic Ocean. The tucupi soup, made from the fermented liquid pressed from manioc root, and the tacacai stew with shrimp and jambu leaves that numbs your lips, are things that exist nowhere else on earth.