🇧🇷 Brazil · North (Amazon)
Porto Velho is the capital of Rondônia and one of the big cities of the western Amazon, looking out over the imposing Madeira river, the largest tributary of the Amazon. It's a young, thriving city, born and grown in the heat of one of the most epic and tragic episodes in Brazilian history: the building of the Madeira-Mamoré railway, the 'devil's railway', a colossal undertaking raised in the middle of the jungle at the start of the 20th century at the cost of thousands of lives.
Today that history is the heart of its heritage: the old locomotives, the sheds and the railway museum, alongside the riverfront on the Madeira, tell the epic of rubber, of immigrants from half the world and of the struggle against the jungle. Porto Velho is also a frontier and transit city, a gateway to Bolivia, to Acre and to the Amazon interior, with the mixed energy of regions that grew fast in the heart of the forest.
This guide covers Porto Velho with a practical eye: what to see in the city and its surroundings, how to get there and get around, when to travel and how to use it as a base or a stopover on a trip through the western Amazon. It's not a destination of classic postcards, but anyone who knows how to look finds here one of the most fascinating stories of the conquest of the jungle and of daily life on the Madeira.
The Madeira river region was inhabited by various indigenous peoples long before the Europeans arrived. Porto Velho as a city was born at the start of the 20th century, inseparably tied to the building of the Madeira-Mamoré railway, the line raised to get around the cachoeiras (rapids) of the Madeira and allow Bolivian rubber and rubber from the western Amazon to reach the Atlantic. The work, taken up again by American businessmen between 1907 and 1912, drew thousands of workers from all over the world and cost an enormous number of lives to malaria, yellow fever and the brutal conditions of the jungle, earning it the nickname 'the devil's railway'. Around the railhead grew the settlement of Porto Velho ('old port'), which became a city. After the decline of rubber and, later, the closure of the railway, the region went through new economic cycles: mineral extraction (gold and tin/cassiterite), the migration driven by the opening of the BR-364 highway, which populated Rondônia, and the turning of Porto Velho into a state capital when the territory was raised to statehood in 1981. In the 21st century, the building of the big Santo Antônio and Jirau hydroelectric dams on the Madeira transformed the region again, amid heated environmental and social debate. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The western Amazon state opened up in the twentieth century: land of rubber and of the Madeira-Mamoré 'devil's railway', which cost thousands of lives. It bears the name of Marshal Rondon, protector of Indigenous peoples, and it was the great destination of the state-directed Amazon colonization of the 1970s and 1980s.
Read the history of Rondônia →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of Porto Velho is inseparable from the Madeira river, the largest tributary of the Amazon and one of the highest-volume rivers in the world. Its name, 'Madeira' (timber, in Portuguese), refers to the huge quantity of trunks and vegetation the river drags along during its floods. Its water, loaded with Andean sediment, makes it a 'white water' river, very different from black-water rivers such as the Rio Negro.
Long before the Europeans arrived, the Madeira basin was inhabited by numerous indigenous peoples, belonging to different language families, who lived from fishing, hunting, gathering and farming along the banks and tributaries of the river. The region, in the southwest of the Amazon, was a territory of great natural wealth and complex settlement networks, part of which survives today in the indigenous lands of Rondônia.
The upper course of the Madeira presented a decisive natural obstacle to navigation: a long succession of cachoeiras (rapids and falls) that made it impossible to go upriver by boat beyond a certain point. That geographical feature, which for centuries limited penetration and trade, would be precisely the reason that gave rise, at the start of the 20th century, to one of the most epic undertakings in Brazilian history and to the city of Porto Velho itself.
The birth of Porto Velho is inseparably tied to one of the most tragic epics in the history of engineering: the building of the Estrada de Ferro Madeira-Mamoré (EFMM). The aim of the work was to bypass by land the dozens of cachoeiras that made the upper Madeira unnavigable, so that rubber produced in the western Amazon and, above all, in Bolivia could reach the Atlantic. The question had a geopolitical dimension: after Bolivia ceded Acre to Brazil (Treaty of Petrópolis, 1903), Brazil undertook to build the railway as compensation, to give Bolivia an outlet for its goods.
The definitive construction of the railway was carried out between 1907 and 1912, led by American businessmen and engineers. The work drew a veritable Babel of workers: thousands of men of dozens of nationalities —Caribbean, European, Asian, Brazilians from every region— came to the jungle to lay the rails. Conditions were hellish: malaria, yellow fever, dysentery, accidents and the merciless climate killed an enormous number of workers. The popular legend —which says there was 'one dead man for every sleeper' of the track— exaggerates the figures, but reflects the scale of the tragedy that earned the railway the nickname 'the devil's railway' or 'the railway of the dead'.
Around the head of the railway, on the Madeira, a camp grew that turned into a settlement and then a city: Porto Velho ('old port'). The historical irony is that, by the time the railway was completed in 1912, the Amazon rubber cycle was already deep in crisis, brought down by competition from the plantations of Southeast Asia. The work that had cost so many lives was born, to a large extent, obsolete.
Once completed in 1912, the Madeira-Mamoré railway ran for several decades, but it never met the economic expectations that had justified building it, largely because the collapse of Amazon rubber had ruined its whole reason for existing. Even so, Porto Velho, born as its railhead, established itself as an urban centre and the hub of the Madeira region.
Through the first half of the 20th century, the city and its surroundings lived to the rhythm of the ups and downs of the Amazon economy. There was a brief rubber revival during the Second World War —when the Allies, cut off from Asian rubber occupied by Japan, pushed Amazon extraction again with the so-called 'rubber soldiers'— which partly reactivated the region and the railway. But once the war was over, decline returned.
The Madeira-Mamoré railway was finally shut down and closed in the 1960s-1970s, ending more than half a century of history. Its locomotives, sheds and stations, far from disappearing entirely, remained as testimony to that epic and are today Porto Velho's main historic heritage, turned into a complex and museum. The memory of the 'devil's railway' is still the soul of the city's identity.
The great transformation of Porto Velho and of the whole region came in the second half of the 20th century with integration by land. The opening and, later, the paving of the BR-364 highway, which links Porto Velho with Cuiabá and the Centre-West, unleashed a process of colonization and mass migration into the former Federal Territory of Rondônia, driven by policies to occupy the Amazon and by the promise of land.
Between the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of thousands of migrants —especially from the south and southeast of Brazil— arrived along the BR-364 looking for land and opportunity, in one of the fastest settlement processes in the Amazon. That migration multiplied the population, transformed the landscape (with farming and cattle advancing into the forest) and gave Porto Velho and Rondônia their characteristic mix of people from all over the country, alongside the indigenous peoples and the Bolivians of the border.
That growth led to political and administrative reorganization: in 1981, the Federal Territory of Rondônia was raised to the status of a state of the Brazilian federation, and Porto Velho became its capital. Rapid colonization brought development, but also serious problems: deforestation, land conflicts, pressure on indigenous peoples and speculation. Porto Velho thus consolidated its role as the capital of a young, dynamic state shot through with the tensions typical of the Amazon frontier.
In the 21st century, a new cycle transformed the river and the region once again: the building of big hydroelectric plants on the Madeira. The Santo Antônio dam, very close to Porto Velho, and the Jirau dam, further upstream, were raised to generate power on a large scale as part of Brazil's electricity expansion plans. The works, on an enormous scale, completely altered the regime of a river that for centuries had been defined by its cachoeiras.
Building these mega-dams in the middle of the Amazon generated —and still generates— heated environmental and social debate. Among the concerns are the impact on aquatic wildlife (especially fish migration, the basis of the riverside economy and diet), the flooding of land, the effects on displaced communities, indigenous peoples and traditional populations, and the changes in the river's dynamics. The arrival of works on that scale also caused sharp population and urban growth in Porto Velho.
So the history of Porto Velho traces a fascinating arc: from the cachoeiras that killed men and justified the 'devil's railway' to the gigantic dams that tamed them a century later. The city embodies, as few do, the successive cycles of the conquest and transformation of the Amazon —rubber, the railway, migration, mining, the dams— with everything they hold of epic, of progress and of conflict. Today Porto Velho looks to the future between development and the challenge of preserving the forest around it.