Qualla: Oriximina

Oriximina: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Amit Kenny, CC BY-SA 4.0. The document is dated 20 November 1995, the day Brazil now marks as Black Consciousness Day, the anniversary of the killing of Zumbi dos Palmares three centuries earlier. On that date INCRA, the federal land agency, issued a title to the community of Boa Vista on the Trombetas River, the first quilombo territory in the country ever to receive one. The families it recognized were descendants of people who had escaped slavery and built a life in the forest above the rapids, and who had spent generations being told the ground under their houses belonged to someone else. Boa Vista is in the municipality of Oriximina, in western Para, and it was not the last title granted there.

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Image: Amit Kenny | CC BY-SA 4.0

Oriximina: Above the Rapids

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Prefeitura, Public domain. The Trombetas and its neighbor the Erepecuru run north out of the Guiana Shield into the Amazon, and both are broken by cataracts a short way upstream. Those rapids were the point. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people fleeing plantations and estates on the lowe...

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Image: Prefeitura | Public domain

Oriximina: Land With a Name On It

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Amit Kenny, CC BY-SA 4.0. Oriximina now contains one of the largest expanses of titled quilombo land in Brazil: five formally recognized territories covering 361,800 hectares of rainforest. Roughly ten thousand quilombola people live in the municipality, alongside about 3,500 indigenous residents, spread ...

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Image: Amit Kenny | CC BY-SA 4.0

Oriximina: A Municipality the Size of a Country

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DrRandomFactor, CC BY-SA 3.0. Oriximina is the westernmost municipality in Para and the second largest by area in the state, which also makes it the fourth largest in Brazil. The Equator crosses it. The town itself sits on the Trombetas about 40 kilometers northwest of Obidos, at the narrowest point of the wh...

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Image: DrRandomFactor | CC BY-SA 3.0

Oriximina: Turtles and Bauxite

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Prefeitura Municipal de Oriximiná, Public domain. In 1979 the federal government created the Rio Trombetas Biological Reserve, just over a million hectares of strict protection, established in large part to defend the nesting beaches of the Arrau turtle, the giant of South American rivers, whose eggs had been harvested to the ed...

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Image: Prefeitura Municipal de Oriximiná | Public domain

Oriximina: The Green Block

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carolina Teixeira de Melo Franco, CC BY-SA 3.0. Most of the northern part of the municipality falls inside the Grao-Para Ecological Station, which at more than 4.2 million hectares is the largest fully protected tropical forest conservation unit on the planet; Oriximina holds close to 76 percent of it. Add the 3.1-million-hect...

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Image: Carolina Teixeira de Melo Franco | CC BY-SA 3.0