Brazilian rivers, reservoirs and seas, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 5 learning regions, matching the rounds on the Brazil guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted. Shared rivers and seas appear in one learning group, even when they cross regional boundaries.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 24 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Amazon

The Amazon carries about a fifth of all the river water that reaches the oceans, roughly 209,000 cubic meters a second, which is more than the next seven largest rivers together. Its plume of fresh water is detectable in the Atlantic a hundred kilometers offshore, and there is no bridge anywhere along its main stem.

Negro

The largest blackwater river in the world, stained by decaying leaf litter and so acidic that it carries few mosquitoes, which is one reason a city of two million grew on it. Where it meets the paler Solimões at Manaus the two run side by side for about six kilometers without mixing, because they differ in speed, density and temperature.

Madeira

The largest tributary of the Amazon by volume and about 3,250km long counting its headwaters in the Andes. It carries roughly half of all the sediment the Amazon delivers to the sea. Two run-of-river dams built on it after 2008 flooded far less land than a reservoir would have and still cut the fish migrations that the towns upstream lived on.

Tapajós

A clearwater river, blue-green rather than brown, that meets the Amazon at Santarém in another line where two colors run together. Its lower course is deep enough for ocean ships, which is why the soy grown 1,000km south of it now leaves the country through the Amazon rather than by road to the southern ports.

Xingu

About 1,980km long, and the site of Belo Monte, which has the third largest installed capacity of any dam in the world but produces far less than that for much of the year because the river is seasonal. The fight against it ran for thirty years and is the reason Kayapó leaders in feather headdresses are a familiar image outside Brazil.

Purus

One of the most meandering rivers on earth: about 3,200km of channel covering roughly half that distance in a straight line. The loops cut themselves off and leave crescent lakes across the floodplain, and the map of it is redrawn every few decades because the river moves.

Juruá

About 3,280km long and even more sinuous than its neighbor, winding so much that steamers in the rubber boom took weeks to cover a few hundred kilometers of forest. Most of its length is in Brazil and it drains one of the least populated parts of the country.

Branco

The main tributary of the Negro, and its opposite: white with sediment washed off the Guiana highlands rather than stained black by the forest. It is the river of Roraima, and in the dry season it drops far enough that boats stop running and the state depends entirely on its single road.

Tocantins

About 2,450km long, and not a tributary of the Amazon at all: it reaches the sea through a separate channel beside the delta, which is a distinction Brazilian geography insists on. The Tucuruí dam near its mouth was the first large hydroelectric project built in the rainforest, and it flooded 2,850 square kilometers.

Araguaia

It splits in two for 320km around Bananal, the largest river island in the world at about 19,000 square kilometers, which floods every wet season and is home to the Karajá. The two branches rejoin, and the river then runs on north to meet the one it is a tributary of.

São Francisco

About 2,900km long and the only large river that runs through the northeastern drought country, which is why Brazilians call it the river of national integration. It flows north for 1,500km before turning east, and the canals built after 2007 to divert part of it into four drier states are among the most argued-over public works in the country.

Paraná

The second longest river in South America, and the most dammed: a staircase of reservoirs runs down it. The Itaipu dam near the border with Paraguay generates around a tenth of Brazil’s electricity and nearly all of Paraguay’s, and the basin below it carries the barge traffic out of the interior to the sea.

Uruguay

It rises in the coastal mountains of southern Brazil and forms about 400km of the border before leaving the country. The river is shallow and rocky along that stretch and floods hard, and the dam at Salto Grande, built jointly with Argentina and Uruguay downstream, is one of the earliest binational hydroelectric schemes anywhere.

Parnaíba

About 1,400km long and the border between Piauí and Maranhão for nearly all of it. Its mouth is a delta of more than seventy islands spread across 2,700 square kilometers, one of the only open-sea deltas in the Americas, with dunes moving over the top of the channels.

Doce

In November 2015 a tailings dam on one of its tributaries collapsed and sent around 40 million cubic meters of mine waste down this river, killing 19 people and reaching the Atlantic 650km away in seventeen days. It is the worst environmental disaster in Brazilian history, and the river has not recovered.

Itaipu Reservoir

The dam finished in 1984 is shared with Paraguay and produces more electricity in a year than almost any other. Filling it in 1982 drowned the Guaíra falls, which had been one of the largest waterfalls in the world by volume, and the rock was later dynamited for navigation.

Tucuruí Reservoir

The first large dam built in the Amazon basin, completed in 1984. It flooded about 2,850 square kilometers of forest, and much of the timber was left standing under the water, where it is now cut by divers with hydraulic saws and sold as hardwood.

Sobradinho Reservoir

One of the largest artificial lakes in the world at about 4,200 square kilometers, filled in 1978. It moved roughly 70,000 people off four towns and the land around them, and it holds the flow of the river steady for the power stations and irrigation schemes downstream.

Furnas Reservoir

Locals call it the sea of Minas: about 1,400 square kilometers of drowned valleys with a shoreline thousands of kilometers long. It was finished in 1963 to power the industrial boom in the two states below it, and it is now as much a holiday coast as a power scheme.

Lagoa Mirim

About 3,750 square kilometers of shallow water shared with Uruguay, and the border runs through it. It drains into the larger lagoon to the north through a channel, and the flat country around both is where most of Brazil’s rice is grown.

Lagoa dos Patos

The largest lagoon in South America, about 10,100 square kilometers, separated from the Atlantic by a sandbar 240km long and joined to it by one narrow opening. Porto Alegre stands at the top of it, and everything the state exports has to pass through that single gap.

Baía de Marajó

The southern channel of the Amazon delta, with Belém on it, and the island it runs around is about the size of Switzerland. The tide meets the river current here hard enough to raise the pororoca, a bore wave that runs upstream for kilometers and can be heard before it is seen.

Baía de São Marcos

The tidal range here reaches about seven meters, among the largest in the Atlantic, which is why the port on it can load the deepest-drafted ore ships afloat and why the city beside it was built where it is. São Luís sits on an island in the bay.

Atlantic Ocean

Brazil has about 7,400km of Atlantic coastline and most of its people live within a couple of hundred kilometers of it. The country was reached from the sea in 1500 and administered from it for four centuries, which is the argument the capital was moved inland in 1960 to settle.

How this one works

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