Belém

The Feira do Açaí starts at half past four in the morning on the Ver-o-Peso quay, when the boat comes in from Breves. Buyers pull berries out of the baskets and hold them up against a phone torch, taste one, spit it out, and only then start on the price. A rasa goes for sixty to a hundred reais and beats out about ten litres, or five if you want it thick enough to stand a spoon in.

Ver-o-Peso is 35,000 square metres of this, listed by IPHAN in 1977 and older than nearly everything around it: the Portuguese Crown put the Casa do Haver o Peso at the old Porto do Piri in 1625, and the buildings standing there now went up in the art nouveau of the belle époque. The complex is a set of named parts, the meat market and the fish market, the Solar da Beira, the Doca, the Feira do Açaí, the Ladeira do Castelo, and what moves through them is fruit and vegetables, meat, fish and shellfish, aromatic herbs, castanha do Pará and craftwork. Outside it, the city is shaded by thousands of mango trees left by the architect Antônio José Landi's planting, which is where the name Cidade das Mangueiras comes from; the species is Indian and was the first used here. October belongs to the Círio de Nossa Senhora de Nazaré, the largest religious event in the municipality and one of the largest in the country, and when the procession is over families sit down to pato no tucupi and maniçoba. Rain is a constant rather than a season here, at an annual average around 2,085 millimetres, with the temperature holding near 26.7 degrees all year.