1974: The Formal Debut of a Brazilian River Port

February 11, 1974

In the state of Pará in northern Brazil, a port in the city of Santarém was inaugurated. The Port of Santarém is located on the right bank of the Tapajós River and only about two miles (three kilometers) from where this river converges with the Amazon River. (The Tapajós River is formed in part by the Teles Pires River, another major tributary of the Amazon.) The port is strategically situated about 544.3 miles (876 kilometers) upstream of Pará’s capital city of Belém and approximately 450 miles (725 kilometers) downstream from Manaus, the capital city of the Brazilian state of Amazonas.

In the decades since its opening, the Port of Santarém has played a pivotal role for both cargo and passenger vessels in that part of Brazil. “You’re truly in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon in this port, located midway between Belém and Manaus,” noted Lena Katz in a post that she wrote for the blog ShermansTravel. “Although only a fraction of the size of the two cities, Santarém is one of the region’s busier export hubs as well as a popular river cruise stop near the confluence of the Amazon and Tapajós rivers.”

The Port of Santarém has been instrumental in transporting commodities such as corn, soybeans, and timber from the Amazon basin. The port’s commercial significance was underscored in Optimization and Capacity Increase in Grain Export at the Port of Santarem, a 2022 report co-authored by Cristiano Moreira Paula, Edivaldo Maues Carvalho Neto, João Paulo Paiva Ferreira, Lucas Elias da Silva, and Thiago Vinicius Almeida Barbosa Lima. “It is a strategic port of integration between road and waterway modals for the loads that flow though the [Brazilian highway] BR-163 and the Tapajos-Teles Pires rivers,” asserted this report.

The Port of Santarém is managed by the Companhia Docas do Pará (CDP), a company that was founded in 1967 and oversees all of the ports in Pará.

Photo Credit: Oski67 (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)

For more information on the Port of Santarém, please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Santar%C3%A9m