Iquitos Peru is an inland city in the Loreto region of Peru. It is the capital of Maynas Province and the largest city in Peru’s share of the Amazon jungle. Iquitos holds the interesting title of the largest city in the world without road access; traveling to and from the city can only be done by air or by water.
Starting as a small Jesuit-founded community in the 1750s, Iquitos found itself strategically located in the center of the rubber trade that exploded in the middle of the 1800s. Iquitos was at that time the most important city in the Amazon for the export of rubber out of the region for international trade. Accordingly, investment found its way to Iquitos during the peak of rubber trade, and much of the city’s antique architecture from that time is still evident in the city today. The eventual decline of rubber demand from the Amazon led to a gradual decline in investment and also in population as many of the rubber workers left with the money driving the industry.
In more recent time Iquitos has diversified its industry into timber, fishing crops, and other exports. Its location makes it a good place for raw materials to pass through on their way to port cities on the coast of South America. With the increase in interest and tourism to the Amazon rainforest, the city’s strategic location has also lent itself to become a jump-off point, or a base camp of sorts, for people wishing to push further into the jungle for various touristic purposes. The city has, for good reason, acquired the nicknames “Capital of the Peruvian Amazon” and “Gateway to the Amazon” due to the city’s uniquely large size so deep into the Amazon basin.
Iquitos is a unique city for its architecture as well as for the non-standard means of travel required to reach it. At almost a half-million people, the population of Iquitos would normally suggest a city accessible by roads, but to this day the city is accessible only by planes and boats.
Iquitos is conveniently located for those who choose to attend an ayahuasca retreat of one kind or another in Peru. Indigenous peoples with long ancestry still live in the rural countryside surrounding the city of Iquitos, some of whom have been the curanderos of their communities for generations. The Shipibo-Conibo people, for example, have lived in the Amazonian rainforest many generations, going back as far as can be documented. As with many native populations throughout the Amazon, the Shipibo-Conibo people practice their own holistic and traditional medicine, with masterful understanding of how to use the jungle’s flora to address any number of dis-eases.
