Teatro Amazonas

One of the world’s grandest opera houses, Teatro Amazonas sits amid the lush wilderness of our largest rainforest. The birth of this extraordinary venue came in the late 1800s, when the world was intoxicated by rubber (or, rather, the riches to be gleaned from it). Rubber trees are native to the Amazon, so the remote city of Manaus—became a hub for an influx of opportunists.

Rubber brought wealth, and for a brief time Manaus became one of the richest cities in the world. Sparkling jewels, domesticated jungle beasts, and abundant champagne became standard fare, as the city exploded with extravagant buildings. Teatro Amazonas was its most impressive structure.

Parisian furniture, Italian marble, British ironwork, French glasswork, and thousands of tiles for a mosaic around its dome were imported. Electrical lighting was used—an advance not yet seen in great performance cities like Paris or New York. The result was dazzling evidence of Manaus’s seemingly limitless new wealth.

Life in Manaus continued shimmering until Englishman Henry Wickham smuggled tens of thousands of rubber pods out of the country. Plantations from Southeast Asia to Africa began producing rubber efficiently, and Manaus’s champagne reserves began to dry up. As the rubber industry lost its bounce, the theater lost its luster, the city fell into poverty, and in 1924 the last aria was heard from within the Teatro’s grand doors.

Decades later, enterprising souls restored this forgotten gem, and in 1997 Teatro Amazonas reopened with performances courtesy of the Amazonas Philharmonic, who have helped revive the “Paris of the Tropics.

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