Manaus, bewitching Amazonia

First, we see the river, immense, wide, falsely appeased. Then we guess the forest, nibbled but opening onto infinity. It is only then that the images of this rubber rush return, which in the second half of the 19e century of Manaus the “Paris of the tropics”. The development was as sudden as it was anarchic, as ephemeral as it was excessive.

Extravagant luxury, immense and rapid fortunes, miserable living conditions of “syringeiros”, the rubber tree collectors… Legends still ring, which local historians deny, but which speak of the madness of the time: the surroundings of the opera house were paved with rubber to muffle the noise of the horse-drawn carriages, certain notables would have sent their laundry to be washed in Portugal… In 1876, alas, a perfidious Englishman, Henry Alexander Wickham, succeeded in stealing a sufficient number of rubber tree seeds to be able to grow trees in greenhouses that would be sent to Malaysia and in Indonesia. The end of Amazon rubber is near. Manaus collapses.

Looking for traces of this past splendor is the most moving of pilgrimages. The dilapidation, the patina, the rust have charged them with an emotion that the display of gold and ostentatious pretension were probably powerless to arouse in the same way. Even more than in the famous opera house, restored between 1988 and 1990, we find them wandering the streets, crossing large squares adorned with statues of characters now forgotten, discovering behind a rickety gate the unhinged shutters of a sumptuous residence whose vegetation today invades the stairs…

In the historic center, the glimmers of the past

The iron buildings, Eiffel type, of the Adolpho Lisboa market built by the Belgian Joseph Danly, have kept their prestige, even if the market itself has grown considerably. We still come across sellers of cassava, fish, all these objects necessary for the life of the caboclos, a population living on the banks of the river. The market has moreover largely overflowed this metal skeleton, and the surrounding streets are a real display of shops, bric-a-brac that wraps around the very beautiful Nossa Senhora da Conceiçao cathedral.

San Sebastian Square, in the center of Manaus.

Encompassing the market and going up towards the opera extends the historic center. Here again, the glimmers of the past can be seen at the end of a courtyard, behind trees, wedged between two large concrete towers. The oldest houses struggle as best they can against humidity and rot. For one which, restored, serves as the seat of the Geographical and Historical Institute of Amazonia, how many are crumbling, abandoned? Large squares built on the model of plazas mayores Spanish, vast and rectangular, mark the colonial imprint. Orchestras invest them in the evening, and it is not uncommon to come across a samba group practicing at the end of an alley.

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