The city of Manaus, on the Amazon River in Brazil, was once the epicenter of the rubber industry, because it was in that area that rubber trees grew. As the city's population increased, people began to build houses out on the river, connected by wooden planks. This became the Floating City, where eventually 11,000 people lived in 2,000 houses, supported by quite a few floating businesses.
“The poor people who wanted to remain close to downtown began to realize that living in a floating city was much more interesting for them than living in more distant areas,” says Leno Barata, a historian who wrote his doctoral thesis on the Floating City, in Portuguese. “And living on the river also had other advantages, such as not paying rent or city taxes.”
Initially there were only a handful of disconnected floating houses. But the number rapidly increased after World War II, following a temporary return of the Rubber Boom. With the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, the United States and the Allied Forces were cut off from their rubber supply and turned to Brazil for help. As a result, tens of thousands of Brazilians, mostly from the poor Northeast region, were sent to the Amazon region to relaunch the rubber industry. When the war ended, many of these “rubber soldiers,” as they became known, ended up in Manaus.
The Floating City became a tourism draw, offering lower prices for goods and illicit pleasures. Some people found it charming, and compared it to Venice. Others considered it a slum. The people who lived there called it home, and have fond memories of the neighborhood, which was dismantled in the 1960s. Read about the rise and fall of the Floating City of Manaus at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Eduardo Braga/Instituto Durango Duarte)