Iquitos Travel Information and Travel Guide - Peru

Introducing Iquitos

Linked to the outside world by air and by river, Iquitos is the world’s largest city that cannot be reached by road. It has a unique personality: friendly, noisy, sassy and slightly manic. Travelers come here for an excursion into the rainforest or a river trip along the Amazon, but they often stay a few days to relish this remote jungle capital of the huge department of Loreto.

Iquitos was founded in the 1750s as a Jesuit mission, fending off attacks from indigenous tribes who didn’t want to be converted. The tiny settlement survived and grew slowly until, by the 1870s, it had 1500 inhabitants. Then came the great rubber boom, and by the 1880s the population had increased 16-fold. For the next 30 years, Iquitos was at once the scene of ostentatious wealth and abject poverty. The rubber barons became fabulously rich, and the rubber tappers (mainly local tribespeople and poor mestizos) suffered virtual enslavement and sometimes death from disease or harsh treatment. Signs of the opulence of those days are seen in some of the mansions and tiled walls of Iquitos.

Show full overview