Ilha de Marajó

The 8th Battalion in Soure has been patrolling on buffalo since 1992, and the reason is practical: the ground floods, and a motorcycle cannot go where a 590-kilo animal can. Two of them, Baratinha and Canária, come down to the port to meet the boats. That is the island in one image, a place where the buffalo is the transport, the police mount, the economy and the cheese.

Marajó lies in the Amazon's mouth and is reached only by water, either by fast boat from Belém's hydroviary terminal, about two hours twenty to Soure, or by car ferry from Icoaraci to Porto Camará and thirty-one kilometres of road. Pará holds 38 per cent of Brazil's buffalo by the 2017 agricultural census, and the island's cheese has had a geographical indication from INPI since 2021, covering producers in Cachoeira do Arari, Chaves, Muaná, Ponta de Pedras, Salvaterra, Santa Cruz do Arari and Soure. The beaches out of Soure are named and close, Pesqueiro at eight kilometres under dunes and coconut palms, Araruna and Barra Velha at three, the last of them backed by mangrove. In the Pacoval district the Ateliê Arte Mangue Marajó makes Marajoara ceramics and wood carvings and runs pottery workshops, and inland at Cachoeira do Arari the Museu do Marajó, founded in 1972 by the priest and museologist Giovanni Gallo, is free to walk into. The rains run January to May and turn the campos to water; July is the month the ground comes back and goes gold.