page_title: Iquitos
section_title: 20th century: Rubber boom
hierarchical_section_title: Iquitos / History / 20th century: Rubber boom
caption_attribution_description: Português: Imagem do Fundo Ministério da Guerra, do Arquivo Nacional
context_page_description: Iquitos, also known as City of Iquitos, is the capital city of Peru's Maynas Province and Loreto Region. The largest metropolis in the Peruvian Amazon, east of the Andes, it is the ninth-most populous city of Peru.
  It is known as the "capital of the Peruvian Amazon". The city is located in the Great Plains of the Amazon Basin, fed by the Amazon, Nanay, and Itaya rivers. Overall, it constitutes the Iquitos metropolitan area, a conurbation of 471,993 inhabitants consisting of four districts: Iquitos, Punchana, Belén, and San Juan Bautista. It is the largest city in the world that cannot be reached by road – it is accessible only by river and air.
  The area was long inhabited by indigenous peoples. The founding date of the European city is uncertain. Spanish historical documents state that it was set up around 1757 as a Spanish Jesuit reduction by the banks of the Nanay River. The Jesuits gathered local Napeano and Iquito natives to live here, and they named it San Pablo de Napeanos.
  In the late 19th century, the city became the center of export of rubber production from the Amazon Basin and was the headquarters of the Peruvian Amazon Company.
context_section_description: Beginning in the 1900s, Iquitos became wealthy through its rubber industry throughout the rubber boom; it attracted thousands of immigrants from around the world, mostly young single men who hoped to make their fortunes in rubber. The rise of the automobile and related industries had dramatically increased the worldwide demand for rubber. Some men became merchants and bankers, and made their fortunes that way. Many of the European men married indigenous women and stayed in Peru the rest of their lives, founding ethnically mixed families. The immigrants brought European clothing styles, music, architecture and other cultural elements to Iquitos. They established an opera house that featured European classical music.
  Among the unique communities formed by the 19th-century immigrants to the rubber boom was one of Sephardic Jews from Morocco. Many of the men married Peruvian women and made families in Iquitos. They established a synagogue and the Jewish cemetery. In the first generation, some of the women or children converted to Judaism, but by the end of the 20th century, four or five generations later, most descendants were no longer practicing Jews. Most were reared as Catholic.
  In the 1990s, a descendant of a Jewish settler undertook serious study of Judaism. He began to revive the practice of Judaism among his family, friends, and other Sephardi descendants. After years of study, with the help of a sympathetic Conservative rabbi in Lima and another from Brooklyn, New York, eventually a few hundred people studied, practiced as Jews, and converted to Judaism. (Formal conversion was necessary according to Halakha as their mothers were not Jewish.) Many of the converts have emigrated to Israel under its Law of Return. A documentary was made about this community in 2010. Emigration of Peruvians from this Iquitos community has continued; about 150 emigrated in 2013 to 2014.
  The wealthiest Europeans built great mansions in the late 19th century, some of which survive. Casa de Fierro (Spanish for the Iron House) is said to have been designed by Gustave Eiffel, designer of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, but evidence supporting this claim is scant. After an Englishman smuggled rubber seeds out of the area to establish competing rubber plantations in British colonies in southeast Asia and Africa, the Peruvian boom came to an end. In addition, a 1913 investigative report by Roger Casement, British consul-general to Peru, revealed the abuses of indigenous workers in the Amazon Basin by the Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC), owned by businessman Julio César Arana. Its several British board members and numerous stockholders in London were pressured to force changes in operations of the company. Many British divested themselves of this company in an effort to force changes. Arana returned to Peru, where he remained in charge of the PAC. Asian rubber was soon produced at lower cost and undercut that of South America, and rubber declined in importance in Peru.
  But Iquitos continued as an important trading port in the Amazon basin. It exploited its timber, oil and mineral resources for export and processing, along with agricultural and other products.
caption: Port of Iquitos, 1930.
exif: {"Image SubfileType": "Full-resolution Image", "Image ImageWidth": "4839", "Image ImageLength": "3293", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image Compression": "LZW", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Make": "Phase One", "Image Model": "P 45+", "Image StripOffsets": "[]", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image RowsPerStrip": "1", "Image StripByteCounts": "[]", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Windows Photo Editor 10.0.10011.16384", "Image DateTime": "2019:07:09 15:18:13", "Image Predictor": "Horizontal differencing", "Image ExifOffset": "28790", "GPS GPSDOP": "Windows Photo Editor 10.0.10011.16384", "Image GPSInfo": "31022", "Image Padding": "[]", "EXIF ExposureTime": "7692/461555", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "50", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2010:02:02 09:39:19", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2010:02:02 09:39:19", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "5907/1000", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "00", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "00", "EXIF Padding": "[]"}