River · Ecuador
Napo River
Napo River flows out of the Andes through the rainforest of eastern Ecuador and finally joins the mighty Amazon near Francisco de Orellana in Peru. Boats carry people and goods along its wide brown water.
Picture credit: Murray Foubister (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Murray Foubister (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is the Napo River?
The river starts here: Andes of eastern Ecuador.
It ends in the Amazon River near Francisco de Orellana, Peru.
Countries on the river: Ecuador.
The story behind it
The Napo begins as cold mountain streams and grows fast once it reaches the warm lowlands. Rainforest presses against both banks, and pink river dolphins, caimans, turtles and hundreds of bird species live in and around the water. Many villages have no road at all, so canoes and motorboats are the buses of the region. After heavy rain the river swells, tears away sandbanks and builds new islands somewhere else, which means the map is never quite finished. Books do not fully agree on how long the Napo really is, because measuring every bend of a jungle river is hard work. Kichwa families fish here, wash here and travel here, so they watch closely when oil work or gold mining makes the water cloudy. For them the river is street, market and larder at the same time.
Questions children ask
How long is the Napo River?
The Napo is about 1 130 km long. Different books give slightly different figures, because a rainforest river keeps changing its bends and is hard to measure exactly.
Which country does the Napo River flow through?
Where does the Napo River end?
It joins the Amazon near the town of Francisco de Orellana in Peru. From there its water travels thousands of kilometres further east to the Atlantic Ocean.
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.
Last checked: