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ARAPIUNSVilla · Rio Arapiuns, Pará

The Arapiuns journal

What we have learned living on this river: the beach calendar, how to get here, what community-led tourism actually means, and the questions everyone asks before they come.

  1. Host your retreat on the Rio Arapiuns

    A whole-property retreat venue in the Brazilian Amazon: thirteen bungalows, a covered pavilion, a yoga shala and a private freshwater beach, for groups from fifteen guests.

    A dozen people standing on mats along a wooden deck under a long palm-thatched roof, hands together at the chest, with solar panels mounted above the roofline

  2. What community-based tourism is — and how it works in practice

    Community-based tourism isn't tourism with a community visit tacked on. It's tourism where the people who live there decide, run it, and get paid. How that works inside an extractive reserve on the Rio Arapiuns.

    Two women bent over a wooden board full of cassava mash, under a palm-thatched shelter, with other people around them

  3. Tapajós or Rio Negro: which Amazon should you choose?

    Almost every Brazilian Amazon lodge sits on the Rio Negro near Manaus. The Tapajós is the other option, and the two give you genuinely different trips. An honest comparison.

    Three people walking away from the camera along a sandy forest track, dense green vegetation pressing in on both sides

  4. Best time to visit Alter do Chão: a month-by-month beach calendar

    When the Tapajós and Arapiuns beaches appear and disappear, month by month, and which months suit beaches, flooded forest, festivals or an empty river.

    Two people walking away across an enormous pale sandbank, with more figures and moored boats far off at the waterline under a hazy sky

  5. Are there mosquitoes in Alter do Chão? The honest answer

    Why the clearwater beaches of the Tapajós and Arapiuns have almost no mosquitoes, where you will actually meet them, and what that means for an Amazon trip.

    Sandbank curving into clear blue river water, sun high, forest line on the far shore, the sandy bottom visible through the shallows

  6. How to get to Alter do Chão — and to the Arapiuns beyond it

    Flights to Santarém, the transfer to Alter do Chão, and the boat up the Rio Arapiuns. Times, costs, connections and what actually goes wrong, written from the far end of the trip.

    Four people wading through shallow river water carrying bags, with a white boat moored behind them and open water to the horizon

  7. Rio Arapiuns: the guide from someone who lives on it

    What the Rio Arapiuns is, where the white-sand beaches are, when the river drops, how to get there from Alter do Chão, and where to stay. A guide written from inside the Tapajós-Arapiuns RESEX.

    Golden sandbank stretching into the blue river, footprints in the sand and the tree line on the horizon