🇧🇷 Brazil · North (Amazon)
Macapá is one of the most singular capitals in Brazil: the only one crossed exactly by the equator, which divides the city —and the country— between the northern and southern hemispheres. Looking out over the río Amazonas, near its colossal mouth on the Atlantic, this capital of the state of Amapá lives with a foot in each hemisphere and its eyes on the great river and the forest that covers much of its territory.
It's a city of extraordinary geography and curiosities: the Marco Zero monument marks where the equator passes, and the local football stadium, nicknamed the 'Zerão', is built so that the equatorial line crosses right through the centre of the pitch, leaving each team in a different hemisphere. On top of that there is the imposing Fortaleza de São José, a remnant of the colonial struggle over these lands, and the phenomenon of the pororoca, the spectacular tidal wave that runs up the Amazon rivers.
This guide covers Macapá with a practical eye: what to see in the city and its surroundings, how to get there (with no road connection to the rest of the country) and how to get around, when to travel and how to use it as a base for discovering Amapá, one of the most preserved and least visited states of the Brazilian Amazon. Macapá is the doorway to a different Brazil, equatorial and on the frontier.
The Amapá region and the mouth of the Amazon were inhabited by Indigenous peoples, and were the stage for colonial disputes between the Portuguese, French, English and Dutch, drawn by the region's wealth and by its strategic position at the mouth of the great river. To secure Portuguese control against those claims, in the 18th century the imposing Fortaleza de São José de Macapá was raised, one of the largest colonial fortresses in Brazil, whose construction stretched over decades. The village of Macapá grew up around it. For a long time the region was in dispute with France (over neighbouring French Guiana); the 'Franco-Brazilian Contested Territory' dispute was settled in Brazil's favour by international arbitration in 1900. In the 20th century, Amapá was created as a Federal Territory (1943), with Macapá as its capital, and lived through economic cycles such as manganese mining at Serra do Navio. With the 1988 Constitution, Amapá was raised to the status of a state of the federation, and Macapá was confirmed as its capital. Today the city combines its colonial heritage, its unique equatorial geography and its role as the centre of one of the Brazilian states with the highest proportion of preserved forest. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The state of the far north, between the rainforest and the Atlantic, crossed by the line of the equator: land of the Fortress of São José, of a border disputed with France for centuries and of one of the largest protected tropical rainforests in the world.
Read the history of Amapá →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Macapá was born, like so many cities in the Brazilian Amazon, in the shelter of a fortress. In the 18th century, the Portuguese Crown was determined to secure its hold on the northern bank of the mouth of the río Amazonas, a region also coveted by the French, English and Dutch operating out of the Guianas. To fix the border and protect that doorway to the great river, the Portuguese decided to raise a settlement and a large fortress there.
The name 'Macapá' has a Tupi Indigenous root. The most widespread explanation links it to the expression 'macapaba' or 'macapá', which would refer to a place with an abundance of bacabas, an Amazonian palm whose fruit is highly prized: it would mean something like 'place of many bacabas'. Before the Europeans arrived, the region was inhabited by Indigenous peoples, and settlers from the Azores were later added, brought in by the Crown to populate the territory.
The village of São José de Macapá was formally established in 1758. A few years later work began on its great defensive structure, the Fortaleza de São José de Macapá, raised to guard the northern edge of the Amazon estuary. That frontier village, born of military strategy and Amazon geopolitics, would be the seed of today's capital of Amapá.
The monument that defines Macapá's historic identity is the Fortaleza de São José de Macapá, considered the largest Portuguese colonial fortification in the whole Amazon and one of the largest in Brazil. Construction began in 1764 and stretched over decades, until it was practically finished around 1782. It was raised with laterite stone, bricks brought as ballast on ships from Portugal, and the labour of Indigenous people, enslaved people and settlers.
The fortress, star-shaped with four bastions and an extensive perimeter of walls, was conceived for heavy artillery and to withstand a possible attack from the river. Its mission was clear: to command access to the northern bank of the mouth of the Amazon and deter any foreign attempt to push into the territory Portugal claimed as its own. Although it never fought any great battles, its mere presence achieved the geopolitical aim of asserting Portuguese sovereignty in the region.
Today the Fortaleza de São José is the city's main historic heritage site and a meeting point for the people of Macapá: a setting for cultural events, festivals and walks, with a view over the river. Visiting its walls and bastions means looking in on the past of a contested frontier, where much of the fate of Brazil's far north was decided.
Macapá's great geographical distinction is that the equator —the zero parallel— runs through the city. That makes the capital of Amapá one of the few cities in the world sitting exactly on that imaginary line separating the northern and southern hemispheres, a fact the people of Macapá celebrate as a mark of identity: in Macapá you can, literally, have a foot in each hemisphere.
To mark this point the Marco Zero do Equador was built, a monument with a large obelisk raised on the equatorial line. Next to it stands Macapá's Sambódromo, and a curious detail of the place is that, twice a year, at the equinoxes, the sun aligns in such a way that its rays pass through certain points of the monument, a phenomenon that draws the curious. The Marco Zero is today one of the city's great attractions and an obligatory stop for anyone visiting.
Very close by is another local symbol, the Estádio Milton Corrêa, popularly known as the 'Zerão', the football stadium whose halfway line roughly coincides with the equator: playing there, each team defends a goal in a different hemisphere. That combination of geography and culture gives Macapá a personality unique on the Brazilian map.
Through the 19th century and the early 20th, the Amapá region was the stage for a long border dispute between Brazil and France, which claimed part of that territory as an extension of French Guiana. This was the question of the 'Franco-Brazilian Contested Territory' (or the Amapá question), a strip of forest and rivers whose sovereignty remained undefined for decades and that nearly triggered conflict. The situation worsened with the gold rush in the area of the río Calçoene, which drew prospectors and stoked the tensions.
The dispute was settled diplomatically. In 1900, an international arbitration held in Switzerland —with the award issued by the Swiss Federal Council— found in Brazil's favour and recognized its sovereignty over the disputed territory. A central role in that diplomatic victory was played by the Baron of Rio Branco, the great architect of Brazil's consolidated borders, whose work definitively fixed this far northern edge of the country.
For much of its modern history, the region depended administratively on the state of Pará. That changed in 1943, when the government of Getúlio Vargas, in the middle of a policy of integrating and defending the borders during the Second World War, created the Federal Territory of Amapá, with Macapá as its capital. The city thus became the seat of a new strategic territory in the far north of Brazil.
The decisive step in Macapá's recent political history came with the 1988 Constitution. That new charter, the fruit of Brazil's return to democracy after the military dictatorship, raised the former Federal Territory of Amapá to the status of a state of the federation. Macapá, already the capital of the territory, was confirmed as capital of the brand-new state of Amapá, gaining full political and administrative autonomy.
From then on, Amapá began electing a governor and had its own legislative assembly, and a period of institutional and urban growth began. Macapá established itself as the great centre of services, commerce and administration for a vast state, thinly populated and largely covered by preserved Amazon rainforest —Amapá is one of the states with the highest percentage of protected forest cover in the country.
Today Macapá is a river city that looks out at the great river: its riverfront on the Amazon, with the Fortaleza de São José, the Marco Zero and the piers, condenses its history and its present. A frontier capital, a city on the equator and the doorway to the eastern Amazon, Macapá combines its military and geopolitical past with a present-day role as a base for exploring the nature and culture of Brazil's far north.