page_title: Source of the Amazon River
section_title: The Apurímac source
hierarchical_section_title: Source of the Amazon River / The Apurímac source
context_page_description: The Source of the Amazon River has been a subject of speculation and exploration for centuries. Three definitions can apply to determining the source of a river. The source can be defined as the most distant upstream point in the drainage basin, or the most distant upstream point of the largest stream of the river, or the most distant source of an uninterrupted flow of water. The source of the Amazon River has been attributed to the headwaters of three different Peruvian rivers in the high Andes: the Marañón, the Apurímac, and the Mantaro.
  Explorers and scholars have identified each of the three rivers as being the source of the Amazon under one of the three definitions. The Mantaro is the most distant upstream point; the Marañón is the main stem of the Amazon; and the Apurímac is the most distant source with an uninterrupted flow of water.
context_section_description: Attention turned to the headwaters of the Apurímac River as early as 1935 when Lake Vilafro (-15.203, -71.880, 4,674 metres (15,335 ft) in elevation) was identified as the source of the Amazon. Several other places in that vicinity were named in the decades that followed with the Carhuasanta River, flowing down from Mismi mountain, first identified as a possible ultimate source in 1969 by Carlos Peñaherrera del Aguila. In 1971, Loren McIntyre led a National Geographic Society expedition to this remote area, frequented only by llama and alpaca herders. On the northern slopes of Mismi, at the headwaters of the Carhuasanta, McIntyre identified a small pond as the source of the Amazon. He named the pond Lake McIntyre and later it appeared on maps as Laguna Bohemia.  It is located at -15.512 Latitude and -71.702 Longitude at an elevation of 5,148 metres (16,890 ft).
  The next major expedition to search the Apurímac headwaters for the source of the Amazon was an expedition headed by Polish-born Jacek Palkiewicz and Peruvian Zaniel I. Novoa Goicochea in 1996. Palkiewicz and Novoa refuted the source identified by McIntyre in favor of a site at the headwaters of the Apacheta River. Their argument was that the Apacheta is a larger river than the Carhuasanta and is longer.  They located the source of the Amazon at a small spring beneath a cliff watering a patch of vegetation 20 metres (66 ft) in diameter.  The spring is located at -15.521 Latitude and -71.761 Longitude at an elevation of 5,182 metres (17,001 ft). It is about 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) from the Laguna Bohemia source.      
  In 1999-2000, a Czech team headed by Bohumir Jansky identified the Carhuasanta River as the source of the Amazon. Later, in 2011, Jansky and his team published the results of a years-long study of the Apurímac headwaters. They described four short rivers, ranging in length from 8.1 kilometres (5.0 mi) to 13.1 kilometres (8.1 mi), which converge to form the Lloqueta river. The Carhuasanta River was the longest and had the largest drainage area of the four.  They identified two sources of the Carhuasanta, including Laguna Bohemia. They did not offer an opinion in their 2011 study of the authentic source of the Amazon, although the Carhuasanta received the bulk of their attention.    
  Also in 2011, the Peruvian government accepted the Apacheta River as the authentic source of the Amazon and unveiled a monument at the site. 
  In 1955, there were six small glaciers in the area of the headwaters.  By 2007, they had all disappeared with possible disruption to the flow of waters into the nearby rivers, and thus an impact on what might be considered the source of the Amazon.
caption: The Apurimac source of the Amazon.
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