The Amazon Basin is the part of South America drained by the Amazon River and its tributaries. The basin is located mainly (54%) in Brazil, but also stretches into Peru and several other countries. The South American rain forest of the Amazon is the largest in the world, covering about 8,235,430 km2 with dense tropical forest. For centuries, this has protected the area and the animals residing in it.
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The Amazon Basin is the part of South America drained by the Amazon River and its tributaries. The basin is located mainly (54%) in Brazil, but also stretches into Peru and several other countries. The South American rain forest of the Amazon is the largest in the world, covering about 8,235,430 km2 with dense tropical forest. For centuries, this has protected the area and the animals residing in it.
Plant life
Not all of the plant and animal life in the Amazon Basin are known because of its huge unexplored areas. No one knows how many species of fish there are in the river. Plant growth is dense because rainfall and regrowth of leaves occur continually throughout each year.
Amazonian indigenous people
The Amazon Basin includes a diversity of traditional inhabitants as well as biodiversity in both flora and fauna. These peoples have lived in the rain forest for thousands of years, and their lifestyles and cultures are well-adapted to this environment.
History
The Amazon basin has been continuously inhabited for more than 12,000 years, since the first proven arrivals of people in South America. Those peoples, when found by European explorers in the 16th century, were scattered in hundreds of small tribes with no writing system except for the part ruled by the Inca Empire. Perhaps as many as 90% of the inhabitants died because of European diseases within the first hundred years of contact, many tribes perished even before direct contact with Europeans, as their germs traveled faster than explorers, infecting village after village.
Upon the European discovery of America, the Portuguese and the Spanish signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the country into a large Spanish western part, which encompassed all of the then unknown North America and Central America, and western South America, the Portuguese had Eastern South America, what would become modern eastern Brazil. The Spanish claim was confirmed by explorers, most famously by the expedition of Francisco de Orellana in 1541-42.
By the late 17th century Portuguese/Brazilian explorers had dominated much of the Amazon basin because the mouth of the Amazon river lay within the Portuguese side, and the Brazilian inward exploration venturers such as the Bandeirantes, who originated in São Paulo, had conquered much of what is today central Brazil (states of Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Goiás) and then proceeded to the Amazon. In 1750 the Treaty of Madrid certified the transfer of most of the Amazon basin and the region of Mato Grosso to the Portuguese side, hugely contributing to the continental size of what is now Brazil.
Brazilian General Cândido Rondon is also reckoned as a major 19th century explorer of the Amazon as well as a defender of its native peoples, the Brazilian state of Rondônia is named after him.
