Novo Airão

The water runs strong-tea brown, and a wooden platform floats on it in front of the town. On the hour a member of staff gives a short talk about the animals, then carries out chilled fish, and the botos come in: pink, heavy, up to two and a half metres, shouldering each other along the deck edge.

Novo Airão sits on the Rio Negro in Amazonas with the Parque Nacional de Anavilhanas straight across the channel, 350,000 hectares of roughly 400 islands and 60 lakes, and the town has grown around what happens on one floating deck. The feeding started in 1997, when the restaurant owner's daughter began giving fish to a boto that kept visiting; by 2011 about fifteen animals were arriving daily, tourists were buying fish portions to hand over themselves, swimming with them and lifting them clear of the water for photographs. ICMBio worked with the operators through a participatory ordering process from 2010, and the activity that survives it is a managed one: staff alone feed the animals, chilled fish only, at most two kilos a day each, across eight half-hour sessions between nine and five, every session opened by a talk on boto biology and conduct. Visitors buy a ticket, watch, photograph and touch, and enter the water only after a session closes, on a submerged platform that holds seven, in a compulsory life jacket and standing still. Boats are kept out of a twenty-metre ring around the deck, and the whole flutuante was moved 200 metres upstream of the town port and its fuel station to get the botos away from the traffic.