Amazon rain forest

We talked a little bit about this place in this blog Cultural differences in Brazil, but today let's talk specifically about Amazon rain forest or Floresta Amazônica in Portuguese. The Amazon rain forest, covering much of northwestern Brazil and extending into Colombia, Peru and other South American countries, is the world’s largest tropical rain forest, famed for its immense biodiversity. It’s crisscrossed with thousands of rivers, the most exceptional being the powerful Amazon. River towns, with 19th-century architecture dating to rubber-boom days, include Brazil’s Manaus and Belém, and Peru’s Iquitos and Puerto Maldonado. Its total area is 2.124 million sq miles. The Amazon represents over half of the planet's remaining rainforests, and comprises the largest and most biodiverse tract of tropical rainforest in the world, with an estimated 390 billion individual trees divided into 16,000 species. It is such a fascinating place to visit if you like preservative nature and if you are NOT afraid of wild animals, specially snakes and insects. 

Captured snake in the Amazon jungle

Snakes there are big, not all of them but there are many big ones, like this one in the picture and sometimes even bigger. You probably saw or heard about it in movies. The Anaconda or Python, of course they are not as big as in the screen but they can still be very scary. But there are much more animals over there. As the largest tract of tropical rainforest in the Americas, the Amazonian rainforests have unparalleled biodiversity. One in ten known species in the world lives in the Amazon rainforest. This constitutes the largest collection of living plants and animal species in the world. 

Jaguar

The region is home to about 2.5 million insect species, tens of thousands of plants, and some 2,000 birds and mammals. To date, at least 40,000 plant species, 2,200 fishes, 1,294 birds, 427 mammals, 428 amphibians, and 378 reptiles have been scientifically classified in the region. One in five of all the bird species in the world live in the rainforests of the Amazon, and one in five of the fish species live in Amazonian rivers and streams. Scientists have described between 96,660 and 128,843 invertebrate species in Brazil alone. Plus the fact that there are species that scientists did not
cataloged yet.

Indios

Amazon is also known by having native South Americans, or Indios. In Brazil, we still have some preserved tribes, where they still try to live by their cultures and beliefs, however most of them are leaving their traditions and moving to the cities around, or at least, they are partially living their traditions, part living a city life.
If you like nature and is not afraid of animals, Amazon forest in Brazil is definitely the right place to go.