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Strategically placed on the Amazon river estuary close to the mouth
of the mighty Rio Tocantins, BELEM was founded by the Portuguese
in 1616 as the City of Our Lady of Bethlehem (Belem). Its original role
was to protect the river mouth and establish the Portuguese claim to
the region, but it rapidly became established as an Indian slaving port
and a source of cacao and spices from the Amazon. Such was the devastation
of the local population, however, that by the mid-eighteenth century
a royal decree was issued in Portugal to encourage its growth: every
white man who married an Indian woman would receive "one axe, two
scissors, some cloth, clothes, two cows and two bushels of seed".
Despite the decree, a shrinking labour force and, in the 1780s, the
threat of attack by a large contingent of Munduruku Indians meant that
Belem was deep in decline before the end of the century. In the nineteenth
century, it sank still further, as the centre of the nation's bloodiest
rebellion, before the town experienced an extraordinary revival as the
most prosperous beneficiary of the Amazon rubber boom. By the end of
the nineteenth century, Belem was a very rich town, accounting for close
to half of all Brazil's rubber exports. At this time rubber was being
collected from every corner of the Amazon. As a result of the boom,
thousands of poor people moved into Belem from the Northeast, bringing
with them new cultural inputs such as music and dance, and, of course,
the candomble and macumba Afro-Brazilian religions. After the crash
of 1914, the city suffered another disastrous decline - but it kept
afloat, just about, on the back of Brazil nuts and the lumber industry.
The wealth generated by the rubber boom is still evident in the shape
of the modern city, whose elegant central avenues lead from the luxuriant
Praca da Republica down to the port, past a historical sector which
is replete with Portuguese colonial architecture. It's a friendly city
with a Parisian feel and a surprisingly modern skyline. Always warm
and often hot (and often wet, too), the climate is generally very pleasant,
with an average temperature of 25°C. Belem remains the economic
centre of the North, and the chief port for the Amazon.
The Praca da Republica , an attractive central park with plenty of trees
affording valuable shade, is a perfect place from which to get your bearings
and start a walking tour of Belem's downtown and riverfront attractions.
The praca itself is sumptuously endowed with fine statues and columns
focusing on its fountain centrepiece. Overlooking it is the most obvious
sign of Belem's rubber fortunes: the nineteenth-century Rococo Teatro
da Paz , dripping with Neoclassical fixtures, the opera house where Anna
Pavlova once danced. Beside it, modern reality is reflected in the young
men cleaning other people's big cars on the pavement, using the roots
of the old trees as cupboards for their buckets and sponges.
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Belem
