Linked to the outside world by air and by river, Iquitos is the world’s largest city that cannot be reached by road. It has a unique personality: friendly, noisy, sassy and slightly manic. Travelers come here for an excursion into the rainforest or a river trip along the Amazon, but they often stay a few days to relish this remote jungle capital of the huge department of Loreto.

Iquitos was founded in the 1750s as a Jesuit mission, fending off attacks from indigenous tribes who didn’t want to be converted. The tiny settlement survived and grew slowly until, by the 1870s, it had 1500 inhabitants. Then came the great rubber boom, and by the 1880s the population had increased 16-fold. For the next 30 years, Iquitos was at once the scene of ostentatious wealth and abject poverty. The rubber barons became fabulously rich, and the rubber tapers (mainly local tribes people and poor mestizos) suffered virtual enslavement and sometimes death from disease or harsh treatment. Signs of the opulence of those days are seen in some of the mansions and tiled walls of Iquitos.

By WWI, the bottom fell out of the rubber boom as suddenly as it had begun. A British entrepreneur smuggled some rubber-tree seeds out of Brazil, and plantations were seeded in the Malay Peninsula. It was much cheaper and easier to collect the rubber from orderly rows of rubber trees in the plantations than from wild trees scattered in the Amazon Basin. Iquitos suffered economic decline during the decades after WWI, supporting itself as best it could by a combination of logging, agriculture (Brazil nuts, tobacco, bananas and barbasco – a poisonous vine used by indigenous peoples to hunt fish and now exported for use in insecticides) and the export of wild animals to zoos. Then, in the 1960s, a second boom revitalized the area. This time the resource was oil, and its discovery made Iquitos a prosperous modern town. In recent years tourism has also played an important part in the economy of the area.

Iquitos has a growing reputation as a tourist community, especially as a jumping-off point for tours of the Amazon rainforest and the Pacaya-Samiria National Preserve, and trips downriver to Manaus, Brazil- the other rubber-industry city in the interior of the Amazon basin - and finally the Atlantic Ocean, which is 2,088 miles away. Iquitos is also home to the prominent Peruvian conservation research organization, Project Amazonas and its three biological stations on tributaries of the Amazon. Scientists, students, and tourists fly into Iquitos, where they transfer to boats for the remainder of their travel to the Project’s research stations.

A boat tour of Belén is a common tourist attraction. Belén is an area of Iquitos that can be accessed by foot in the dry season but is only accessible via boat in the wet season. Many of the homes in this area are tethered to large poles and float upon the rising waters every year, and some homes float year-round. Where the waters begin there are often a few men with their boats who transport locals and tourists for a small fee. There is also an open-air market in Belén (in a part that doesn’t flood). This too is a common tourist attraction. Most notable is the medicine lane, "Pasaje Paquito", an entire block of the market lined with local plant (and animal) medicines, stocking everything from copaiba to chuchuwasai.

Ayahuasca tourism has increased in Iquitos in recent years, with Westerners seeking traditional shamanic experiences using the visionary Amazonian medicinal tea. Although there are some reputable curanderos who can provide a safe context for such experiences, others do not have the specialized training or skills. As with any tourist activity, consumer discretion is advised.

Within the Belén open-air market, tourists may also notice the illegal trade in rainforest primates, parrots, and other wildlife that should be protected by the CITES treaty. Some of these small animals - marmosets, tamarins, and spider monkeys - are purchased locally, but many tropical birds, primates, boas, etc. are smuggled into the United States for the lucrative pet trade, according to Kneidel and Kneidel and TRAFFIC: The Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network.