Bananal Island

Ilha do Bananal sits between the Araguaia and the Javaé, and it is the largest river island on Earth, roughly twenty thousand square kilometres of it. For much of the year most of that is under water. When the level drops, river beaches come out along both channels, and camping on them is what a trip here is built around.

The northern part of the island is Parque Nacional do Araguaia, created by decree on 31 December 1959 and now 555,524 hectares, down from the two million it began with. Its threatened-species list runs to jaguar, giant armadillo, giant anteater, marsh deer and giant otter, alongside three birds and a freshwater mussel. The park is legally two things at once: 378,663 hectares of it, 67.79 per cent, is also Terra Indígena Inãwébohona, the remaining 32.21 per cent overlaps Terra Indígena Utaria Wyhyna and Iròdu Iràna, and a 2006 presidential decree put it under joint administration by FUNAI, IBAMA and the Javaé, Karajá and Avá-Canoeiro. The rest of the island is the Parque Indígena Araguaia, about 1,358,000 hectares homologated on 15 April 1998, where roughly 4,503 people of the Apyãwa, Avá-Canoeiro, Iny Karajá and Javaé live across Formoso do Araguaia, Lagoa da Confusão and Pium. In the island villages of Santa Isabel do Morro, Werebia and Watau, Karajá women model ritxòkò from clay and paint them with the stripes, dots and diamonds of festival body graphics, each figure carrying a scene of village life, a myth or a ceremony; Brazil entered them in its Book of Forms of Expression on 25 January 2012 and revalidated the listing on 17 June 2025.