Peru Guide
The Jungle
Puerto Belén
The most memorable part of town and best visited around 7am when it's most active, Puerto Belén looms out of the main town at a point where the Amazon, until recently, joined the Río Itaya inlet. Consisting almost entirely of wooden huts raised on stilts and, until a few years ago, also floating on rafts, the district has earned fame among travellers as the "Venice of the Peruvian Jungle". Actually more Far Eastern than European in appearance, with obvious poverty and little glamour, it has changed little over its hundred or so years, remaining a poor shanty settlement trading in basics like bananas, manioc, fish, turtle and crocodile meat. Whilst filming Fitzcarraldo here, Herzog merely had to make sure that no motorized canoes appeared on screen: virtually everything else, including the style of the barriada dwellings, looks exactly the way it did during the nineteenth century.
Ask for directions to Pasaje Paquito, the busy herbalist alley in the heart of this frenetic Río Amazonas economic community, synthesizing the rich flavour of the place. Here you'll find scores of competing stalls selling an enormous variety of natural jungle medicines as well as some of the town's cheapest artesania.