The site goes back further than its current name suggests. The land at the mouth of the Jau River - slightly upstream from modern Novo Airao - was inhabited by the Waimiri-Atroari, Crichana, Carabinari, and Jauaperi peoples for centuries before Europeans arrived. In 1668, Brazilian Jesuits founded a mission they called Santo Elias de Jau. Historians believe this was the second or third Portuguese settlement attempt anywhere in Amazonian lands - a remarkably early colonial footprint in a region that Europe could barely reach. The mission persisted through generations of conflict and accommodation between Jesuits and indigenous peoples. In 1759, Joaquim de Melo Povoas, the first governor of the captaincy of Sao Jose do Rio Negro, elevated the village to town status and named it Airao. The name would later return in modified form.

Airao existed as a distinct administrative unit for the next two centuries. Then, during a twentieth-century reorganization of the Amazon's political geography, the district around Airao was absorbed into Manaus. When that arrangement was dissolved in 1938, the community emerged with a new name - Novo Airao, or New Airao - to distinguish it from the original settlement whose ruins still stand downstream at a place called Velho Airao. The old Airao is now a tourist destination in its own right, reachable by boat from the modern town, where visitors walk among crumbling walls and nearby petroglyphs that predate every written account of the region. The stone carvings raise questions no one can fully answer: who made them, when, and for what purpose. The old mission site outlived the mission itself, waiting in the forest for the next arrivals to notice it.

Novo Airao sits at the edge of two of the largest protected areas in Amazonas state. Just across the river stretches Anavilhanas National Park - a 350,018-hectare archipelago of more than four hundred freshwater islands, originally created as an ecological station in 1981 and elevated to a national park in 2008. During high water, the islands become flooded forest - the igapo - where boats can navigate channels that are dry paths during the dry season. The park is home to pink and gray dolphins, giant otters, jaguar, and hundreds of bird species. Upstream lies the Jau National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site straddling the Jau River basin. Novo Airao contains half the Jau park within its municipal boundaries. Between these two protected areas, an enormous tract of Rio Negro rainforest is preserved in a region where deforestation pressure is intense. Novo Airao serves as the gateway.

The town's tourism runs on boats. Local boatmen hire themselves out at the port, taking small groups into the Anavilhanas islands, up to Velho Airao's ruins, occasionally into the Jau. The trips include what one might call the standard Amazon roster: caiman spotting with flashlights at dusk, birding at dawn, piranha fishing for lunch, quiet drifts down flooded corridors. Some boatmen work in Portuguese only. Others have picked up fragments of English from repeated tourists. The Tourist Information Center at the town's entrance - CAT, in Brazilian acronym - maintains a list of licensed lodges, hostels, and operators, and the center offers free phone calls to help visitors plan. Day trips from Manaus are difficult because of bus and boat schedules. Most visitors stay at least one night, sleeping in lodges or small bed-and-breakfasts in town, waking at five to be on the water before the heat.

Beyond the two national parks, Novo Airao's 37,771 square kilometers contain overlapping conservation areas. The municipality holds 24 percent of the Rio Negro Left Bank Environmental Protection Area - a 611,008-hectare sustainable-use zone created in 1995. It contains the 146,028-hectare Rio Negro State Park North Section from the same year. Sixty percent of the 1,140,990-hectare Rio Negro Right Bank Environmental Protection Area falls within Novo Airao's boundaries. Sixteen percent of the 103,086-hectare Rio Negro Sustainable Development Reserve, created in 2008 specifically to block deforestation creeping upriver from Manaus, is also here. The layering is intentional. Novo Airao exists close enough to Manaus that it faces urban pressure, yet far enough up the Rio Negro to still have intact forest. The mosaic of protection keeps it that way - for now. The town is small. The wilderness around it is enormous. The relationship works, mostly, because neither has yet overwhelmed the other.