🇵🇪 Peru · The Amazon (Jungle)
Tarapoto, the 'City of Palm Trees', is the gateway to the high jungle of San Martín and one of the most accessible and complete Amazon destinations in Peru. Set in the Cumbaza river valley, some 350 meters above sea level, it combines warm weather all year, lush nature of waterfalls and lakes, delicious jungle cooking and a lively urban scene. It's only an hour and a half by air from Lima, which makes it a perfect Amazon getaway.
Its great appeal is the variety it packs into a few kilometers: waterfalls such as Ahuashiyacu or Carpishuyacu for cooling off in the middle of the jungle, the touristy Laguna Azul at Sauce for water sports and downtime, the cacao and coffee farms nearby, and the neighboring town of Lamas, with its striking medieval-style castle and the Quechua-Lamista community of the Wayku neighborhood, which preserves a unique culture of Andean-Amazonian roots. In the city itself, the Plaza de Armas and Parque Suchiche are where local life happens.
Tarapoto is ideal for combining adventure and relaxation. It's best to move around on tours or in colectivos to reach the waterfalls and lakes, to bring light quick-dry clothing, repellent, a swimsuit, sunscreen and rain gear, and to keep well hydrated in the heat and humidity. Good air and road connections, along with a wide choice of lodging and restaurants, make the city a comfortable base for exploring the San Martín jungle.
Tarapoto was founded in 1782 by the Spanish bishop Baltazar Jaime Martínez de Compagñón, and its name is linked to the 'taraputus' palm that was abundant in the area, the source of its nickname, the 'City of Palm Trees'. It grew as a commercial hub of the high jungle of San Martín, a region marked in the 20th century by agricultural colonization driven by the Carretera Marginal highway, the boom and bust of crops such as coca in the Alto Huallaga, the violence of Sendero Luminoso tied to drug trafficking between the 1980s and 1990s, and later by pacification and the take-off of tourism and of quality cacao and coffee. Today it's the most dynamic city in its region. More detail on the history page.
Read the full history ↓The high jungle of the northeast: land of waterfalls, lagoons and cloud forests around Tarapoto and Moyobamba, the 'city of orchids', reconverted from coca to coffee and ecotourism.
Read the history of San Martín →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Tarapoto was born in the heart of the high jungle of San Martín, around the Suchiche lagoon, where a native palm called 'taraputus' grew in abundance. That tree gave the city its name and its famous nickname: the 'City of Palm Trees'. The settlement began to take shape in the 1760s, when families from nearby Lamas moved to the spot, and it became formal on August 20, 1782, when the bishop of Trujillo, Baltazar Jaime Martínez de Compañón, during his celebrated pastoral visit, authorized the raising of its church.
From then on, Tarapoto grew as a hub of trade and communications in the northeastern high jungle. Its strategic position in the Cumbaza river valley, some 350 meters above sea level, and its warm climate made it a natural waypoint between the highlands and the Amazon plain, and a collection center for the region's produce.
Through the 19th century and much of the 20th, Tarapoto remained a relatively isolated city, connected to the rest of the country mainly by mule tracks and, later, by fledgling river and air routes, which gave it a development of its own and a mestizo cultural identity, a mix of Andean, Amazonian and Spanish roots, visible today in its music, its crafts and its food.
Some 25 minutes from Tarapoto stands Lamas, a singular town that holds one of the most fascinating cultural stories in the Peruvian Amazon. According to oral tradition and the chronicles, its native inhabitants descend from the Chanka, a warrior people of the central Andes who, after being defeated by the Incas around the 15th century, fled east, crossed the mountains and settled in these hills of the high jungle, mixing with the local Amazonian peoples.
Out of that encounter came a unique Andean-Amazonian culture, preserved above all in the Wayku neighborhood of Lamas. There, for more than five centuries, the Quechua-Lamista community has kept its Quechua language, its traditional dress, its crafts, its music and its festivals, despite colonization and the pressure of the modern world. The town of Lamas as such was founded in 1656 by Martín de la Riva Herrera, under the name 'El Triunfo de la Santa Cruz de los Motilones de Lamas'.
The town's most striking attraction is the Castillo de Lamas, a curious medieval-style building raised in stone and decorated with colorful murals, whose towers offer spectacular views of the valleys. The combination of a European castle in the middle of the jungle and an Indigenous community that preserves Andean roots makes Lamas a unique place, where the history of Peru is told in a different way.
For much of its history, San Martín remained an isolated region, connected to the rest of Peru mainly by river and by mule tracks toward the highlands. That isolation began to break in the 1930s and 1940s, with the building of the first roads, but the great change came in the 1960s, with state backing for the so-called Carretera Marginal de la Selva, an infrastructure project meant to integrate the Peruvian Amazon into the rest of the country and open new land to agricultural colonization.
Thousands of migrant families from the highlands and from mid-sized coastal cities moved to the region along this new road, drawn by the chance to get land of their own as settlers in the Huallaga valley and its surroundings. The process deeply transformed the demography and the economy of San Martín, Tarapoto included, which went from a quiet town to a fast-growing urban center, fed by the farm trade of the new colonization.
Among the crops that spread with this wave of migration was coca, traditionally grown on a small scale for traditional Andean consumption ('coqueo'), but which in the following decades would shift toward large-scale production aimed at international drug trafficking, above all in the neighboring Alto Huallaga (toward Tingo María and Tocache), something that would dramatically mark the recent history of the whole northeastern region.
The boom in coca growing for illicit ends in the Huallaga valley, which runs from Tingo María to areas close to San Martín, turned the region into the epicenter of one of the largest coca economies in the world during the 1980s and 1990s. That illegal wealth also drew the terrorist organization Sendero Luminoso, which opened a front in the Alto Huallaga in 1984 and consolidated it by 1986, charging 'cupos' to the traffickers and controlling clandestine airstrips used to move drugs toward Colombia.
The violence hit the northeastern region hard. One of the most remembered episodes was the attack by between 300 and 400 Sendero fighters on the Uchiza police post in March 1989, which left numerous police officers and civilians dead. For years, Tarapoto and nearby towns lived under the threat of attacks, extortion and the constant fear tied both to terrorism and to drug trafficking, in a climate that severely held back the area's tourism and economic development.
The capture of key Sendero commanders in the Huallaga, such as the man known as 'comrade Artemio' in February 2012, was a decisive blow against the remnants of Sendero Luminoso in the region. In parallel, state programs to eradicate illegal crops, to substitute crops (promoting alternatives such as quality cacao and coffee) and to fund development achieved a drastic reduction in the hectares of illegal coca in the area, laying the groundwork for the pacification and economic recovery San Martín is living today.
Since the early 2000s, with terrorist violence practically wiped out and illegal coca crops sharply reduced, San Martín has gone through a remarkable transformation. Crop substitution programs drove the development of very high quality cacao and coffee, which today compete in international markets and have won the region recognition for their flavor and their sustainable practices, becoming a new legal economic engine for thousands of families that once depended on coca.
In parallel, Tarapoto established itself as one of the fastest-growing tourist destinations in the Peruvian Amazon. Its closeness to Lima by air (a little over an hour's flight), its pleasant climate, its nature of waterfalls and lakes, and its jungle cooking turned it into a popular getaway for both Peruvian and foreign travelers, drawn by experiences that were once unthinkable in a region marked by conflict.
Today Tarapoto is the most populous and dynamic city in San Martín, a symbol of the recovery of a region that managed to leave decades of violence behind and reinvent itself as a destination of nature, culture and good food, without losing sight of the memory of a recent and difficult past.