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Around 700km west of Belem - but closer to 800 as the river flows - SANTAREM is the first significant stop on the journey up the Amazon, a small city of around 130,000 people, which still makes it the fourth largest in the Brazilian Amazon. It is a pleasant, rather sleepy place which feels more like a large town than a city - a world away from the bustle of Belem and Manaus. But don't be deceived by its languid atmosphere, there are plenty of things to do here, and Santarem, positioned right in the centre of the area often referred to as the middle Amazon, a region still largely (and inexplicably) unvisited by tourists, is the perfect base for exploring some of the most beautiful river scenery the Amazon basin has to offer.

It is likely that this area once supported one of the highest populations in the Americas before Europeans arrived, with towns and villages stretching for miles along the riverbanks, living off the rich stocks of fish in the river, and farming corn on even richer alluvial soils, replenished annually when the Amazon flooded. On all the distinctive flat-topped hills around Santarem, there is evidence of prehistoric Indian occupation , easily identified by the terra preta do Indio (Indian black soil), a black compost deliberately built up over the generations by Indian farmers. If you do any walking up and down these hills, especially around Belterra, keep your eyes open for ceramic shards. In recent years, thanks to the work of an American archeologist, Anna Roosevelt, it has become clear that Santarem and its surrounding area is one of the most important archeological sites in the Americas.

Thirty kilometres east of Santarem, more easily accessible by river than by road, is a nineteenth-century sugar plantation called Taperinha . In an excavation there in 1991, Roosevelt unearthed decorated pottery almost 10,000 years old - twice as old as the oldest ceramics found anywhere in the Americas. This suggests that the Amazon basin was settled before the Andes, and that the Americas had been settled much earlier than previously thought. Later excavations in Monte Alegre confirmed that the middle Amazon played an important role in the prehistory of the Americas with cave and rock paintings dotting the surrounding hills also being dated at around 10,000 years old. About two thousand years ago, Indian culture in the region entered a particularly dynamic phase, producing some superbly decorated ceramics comparable in their sophistication with Andean crafts; there are beautiful pieces of Santarem-phase pottery in the small museum in Santarem, and even more in the Museu Goeldi in Belem.

The very first European accounts of the middle Amazon, dating from the early sixteenth century, which talk of swarms of canoes coming out to do battle and of Indian long houses lining the riverbanks, are probably true. The river asssumed its current lightly populated look in the centuries after first contact, as disease and slavery wiped out the Indians or drove them way upriver; as late as 1960 some two hundred Indians were massacred by settlers on a sandbank just south of Itaituba

The waterfront also boasts a surprisingly good museum, the Centro Cultural Joao Foua , a fine turn-of-the-century building constructed during the rubber boom and standing in splendid isolation on Praca Santarem just past the Mascotinho restaurant. The highlight of the collection is some stunning Indian pottery, small but elaborately decorated and around 2000 years old. The building itself is also very pleasant and the shady internal courtyard is a good spot to hide from the sun on a hot day.

In the city itself, the beach which forms at the waterfront in the dry season is definitely not recommended despite the number of locals you'll see swimming there: you can count the raw sewerage outlets draining directly into the water as you walk along the promenade. A much better option is to get the local bus to Maracana on the far side of town, which is clean. There are lots of small bars and restaurants here serving delicious freshly caught fish. The very best beach near Santarem, however, is 15km away at Alter do Chao.