River Madeira’s waters have fallen to their lowest level since the 1960s and the skies overhead have filled with smoke from wildfires that are raging across Brazil.
Vast, desert-like expanses of red-hot sand lie between some river-dwellers and the waters on which they depend for food, transport, education and work. Some of those beaches are hundreds of metres wide.
This year’s drought – which authorities have called the most intense and widespread in Brazil’s history – has brought misery to those who live along the Madeira, and other major Amazon waterways, including the Solimões and the Negro.
In Porto Velho, the largest city on the Madeira, passenger ships have found themselves high and dry because the waters are no longer deep enough to set sail.
Indigenous communities have been hit particularly hard, with dozens of waterways drying up and dry vegetation supercharging wildfires that are ripping through their ancestral homes. Megaron Txucarramãe, an Indigenous leader from the Amazon state of Mato Grosso, said at least four territories in his region were going up in smoke, including in the Capoto Jarina area where a firefighter was killed in the blaze.
“I’ve lived here since I was born and I’ve never seen the forest burn like this … The forest is burning. Animals are burning. Trees are burning. Everything’s burning,” he said, lamenting how Indigenous sages who understood rain patterns were no longer alive to help out. “The firefighters aren’t managing to put out these fires – only rain can do this.”
Erika Berenguer, a tropical forest expert from Oxford University who studies the Amazon, said she feared climate change meant that 2024’s “apocalyptic scenario” and “dystopian sunsets” might simply be a glimpse of an even bleaker future.