Amazônia

Amazônia National Park, also known as Tapajós National Park, was created in 1974 and was the first national park established in the Brazilian Amazon. It is shared between the states of Pará and Amazonas, on the right bank of the Tapajós River, near Itaituba, and was extended in 2006 to compensate for territory affected by infrastructure projects.

It protects terra firme Amazon rainforest, the formation that occupies the non-flooded ground and that concentrates most of the biome's biomass and tree diversity, along with stretches of igapó on the banks and the watercourses themselves. The forest cover is dense and multi-layered, with emergent trees that exceed forty metres, and it is home to the characteristic fauna of Amazonia: jaguar, puma, tapir, peccaries, primates of several species, macaws and a fish fauna of great richness in the Tapajós and its tributaries.

Its situation is precarious. The park lies in the middle of the arc of deforestation, the belt where the agricultural and logging frontier advances on the rainforest, and its immediate surroundings have undergone intense transformation. To this are added the pressure of illegal gold mining in the Tapajós basin, with the associated mercury contamination, the opening of roads and the hydroelectric projects planned for the river. The park's management, in the hands of ICMBio, has been conditioned by those conflicts and by the presence of riverside populations around it.