Nauta is a quiet riverside town in the Peruvian Amazon, about 100 kilometers south of Iquitos, at the end of the only road in the area (the Iquitos-Nauta highway). It's the capital of the province of Loreto and a spot of real geographic weight: nearby, the Marañón and Ucayali rivers meet, and where they join, the Amazon river is born, the mightiest in the world.
Small and unhurried as it is, Nauta is a strategic gateway to the Amazon. It's the starting point for boat trips into the famous Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, one of the largest and richest protected areas in Peru, and a place to experience Amazonian river life, watch wildlife, navigate rivers and channels, and get to know the culture of the river peoples.
This guide covers the essentials of Nauta from a practical angle: how to get there from Iquitos by road, what to see in the town and around it (the meeting of the rivers, the market, the viewpoints), how to organize your way into Pacaya-Samiria from here, and what to bear in mind in a deep-jungle destination. An ideal launching point for the real Loreto Amazon.
Nauta was founded in the 19th century and is considered one of the first mestizo towns of the Peruvian Amazon, tied to the Cocama-Cocamilla indigenous people and to river trade. Its position near the confluence of the Marañón and the Ucayali — where the Amazon is born — made it an important port. Today it's the capital of the province of Loreto and the main gateway to the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The vast Amazonian region of the northeast: lowland rainforest of endless rivers, cradle of the rubber boom, home of Iquitos —the largest city in the world that cannot be reached by land— and the setting of the Leticia conflict.
Read the history of Loreto →If you only have one day, take a guided tour on the first one: it sets up the rest of your trip and saves you a lot of walking. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have over 10 activities in Iquitos. Three are below so you get the idea: tap any of them and they all open.
They depart from Iquitos, 93 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
A few kilometers from Nauta something happens that you can watch from a boat: two enormous rivers, the Marañón and the Ucayali, join their waters and, in that embrace, the mightiest river on the planet is born, the Amazon. Chroniclers tend to say the Amazon 'begins' there, in front of this quiet town of corrugated-iron roofs and sticky heat. That one of the greatest rivers on Earth has its birth certificate next to Nauta says a lot about this place: small in size, enormous in geography. And its history matches that paradox, because Nauta is also one of the first mestizo towns to take root in the vast Peruvian Amazon.
Nauta was founded in the 19th century, around the 1830s, on the bank of the Marañón river, near that confluence with the Ucayali. Its origin is closely tied to the Cocama-Cocamilla indigenous people, skilled river navigators and fishers, and to the river trade that was beginning to knit together the vast Amazon region.
The Cocama-Cocamilla, one of the native peoples of the lowland jungle, had a deep knowledge of the rivers, fishing and navigation, and were fundamental in the making of the settlement. The mixing of this indigenous population with traders, missionaries and settlers gave rise to the mestizo riverside society characteristic of the Loreto Amazon, in which traditions, languages and ways of life merged.
Nauta's location, close to the point where the Marañón and the Ucayali join to form the Amazon, gave it a strategic position from the start as a port and a hub of river traffic. During the 19th century, before the great boom of Iquitos, Nauta played a significant part in the region's trade and life, as one of the places from which economic activity and contact with the rest of the country were organized.
The history of Nauta, like that of the whole Loreto region, is marked by the economic cycles tied to the resources of the jungle and by the central role of rivers as routes of communication. During the 19th century and the early 20th, the Peruvian Amazon lived through the rubber boom, an economic surge that transformed the region, drove the growth of Iquitos and set enormous flows of trade, labor and goods moving along the rivers.
Nauta, sitting at a key point of the river network, took part in this dynamic as a port and a stopover town. However, the rise of Iquitos as the great Amazonian metropolis — favored by its port and its links to international trade — meant that Nauta was left, over time, in a more secondary role, keeping its character as a quiet river town against the bustle of the regional capital.
The local economy went on revolving around fishing, riverside farming, gathering forest products and river trade. Everyday life, governed by the cycles of rising and falling rivers, kept the strong stamp of Amazonian culture and of the Cocama heritage, present in the fishing, the food and the traditions of the town.
A milestone in Nauta's recent history was the building of the road linking it to Iquitos, one of the very few land routes in the whole Loreto region, a territory where the overwhelming majority of places can only be reached by river or by air. This road, roughly 100 kilometers long, tied Nauta to the great Amazonian city and made it easier to move people and goods. Along its length a curious ecotourism corridor also grew up: lodges, butterfly houses, wildlife rescue centers, country houses and stream-side swimming spots that today are identified by the kilometer marker they sit at, and that take in both travelers heading to Nauta and Iquitos families out for the weekend.
Today Nauta is the capital of the province of Loreto and handles administrative and service functions for the riverside communities around it. Its importance for tourism lies above all in being the main gateway to the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, one of the largest protected areas in Peru: from its port set off the expeditions that head into this 'jungle of mirrors', rich in pink river dolphins, paiche, birds and biodiversity.
Being close to the confluence of the Marañón and the Ucayali — the birth of the Amazon — adds a singular geographic draw. So Nauta combines its historical heritage as one of the first mestizo settlements of the Amazon, its traditional river life and its present role as a base for ecotourism in one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet.
The Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, whose main gateway is Nauta, was officially established in 1982 as one of the largest protected natural areas in Peru, covering more than 2 million hectares between the Marañón, Ucayali, Pacaya and Samiria rivers. Its creation answered the need to protect one of the most important flooded forest ecosystems (varillales, aguajales and tahuampas) in the Amazon, home to emblematic species such as the paiche, the Amazonian manatee, the pink river dolphin, the black caiman and numerous birds.
Before the reserve was formally created, the area was already lived in and used by indigenous and riverside communities, many of them of Cocama origin, who based their subsistence on fishing, hunting and gathering forest fruits such as the aguaje. From the start, managing the reserve meant trying to balance conservation with sustainable use of resources by these local populations, a challenge that continues today in the administration of the area by SERNANP (the National Service of Natural Protected Areas).
Over the decades, Pacaya-Samiria became one of the best-known ecotourism destinations in the Peruvian Amazon, drawing travelers from all over the world keen to see its extraordinary biodiversity. That growth in tourism also transformed Nauta's economy, which went from being a quiet river port to the indispensable logistical base for expeditions into the reserve, creating work for guides, boatmen and local operators.
