River · Bolivia, Brazil
Madeira River
The Madeira is the largest tributary of the Amazon. It first forms part of the border between Bolivia and Brazil and then flows through the rainforest to meet the Amazon east of Manaus.
Picture credit: Wilson Dias/ABr (CC BY 3.0 br) · James Martins (CC BY 3.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Madeira River?
The river starts here: Confluence of the Mamoré and Beni rivers at Villa Bella, Bolivia.
It ends in the Amazon River near Itacoatiara, east of Manaus.
Countries on the river: Bolivia, Brazil.
The story behind it
The Madeira begins at Villa Bella in Bolivia, where the Mamoré and Beni rivers meet. Its name means 'wood' in Portuguese. Right at the start it already carries about 18 000 cubic metres of water every second, roughly as much as the Mississippi. At its mouth it brings about 31 200, around 15 per cent of all the Amazon's water. Big ships can travel more than 1 000 kilometres upstream to Porto Velho, where barges load millions of tonnes of grain. Above Porto Velho there used to be many rapids and waterfalls. To get around them, a railway 367 kilometres long was built between 1907 and 1912 to carry rubber. The work was so hard and so many workers fell sick that people called it the 'Devil's Railway'. Today two big power plants, Santo Antônio and Jirau, stand on the river. More than 900 kinds of fish live in the Madeira basin.
Questions children ask
How long is the Madeira River?
The Madeira itself is about 1 450 km long. Counted together with its longest headstreams, the river system measures more than 3 200 km, depending on how it is measured.
What does the name Madeira mean?
Madeira is the Portuguese word for 'wood'. Long before it got this name, native people called the river Cuyari.
Why was a railway built along the Madeira?
Many rapids and waterfalls blocked boats on the upper river. The Madeira-Mamoré Railway, 367 km long, carried rubber around them until it was abandoned in the 1970s.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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