08/04/2022 | 26m 9s | Video has closed captioning.
Fascinating for its geographical location in the Amazon rainforest, Iquitos can only be reached by boat or plane. This capital of the Loreto in Peru has 400,000 residents. Over 1,000 kilometers from the capital Lima, it is the world's largest city without road access. Discover it with host and philosopher Philippe Simay.
Aired: 08/04/22
Expired: 09/01/23
[bright upbeat music] - My name's Philippe Simay, I'm a philosopher, and I'm interested in what architecture can tell us about our lifestyles.
I'll take you to explore some of the most remarkable habitats on the planet in order to discover their meaning and to share their riches.
[engine roaring] [tricycle engine roaring] [upbeat music] Today, I'm in Peru, in Iquitos, the capital of the Loreto.
I'm fascinated by the geographical location of this city.
Lost in the Amazonian rainforest over 1000 kilometers from Lima, the current population of Iquitos is 400,000.
It's the largest city in the world with no road access.
The only way to get there is by boat or by plane.
How did this city, deep in the heart of the virgin forest become one of the largest cities in the country?
To find out, we need to look at the role the river played as it enabled the first inhabitants to settle here and develop trade and commerce.
Part of the population of the Iquitos still lives on the riverbank in Belen.
Located in the floatable part of the city, Belen is a working class district with wooden houses with corrugated iron roofs built on stilts.
Here, five months a year, 70,000 inhabitants live with their feet in the water.
That's why the district is called, not without irony, The Venice of Loreto.
I wonder how it's possible to live near a river that's so unpredictable.
Micher, who was born and raised here is waiting for me at the jetty in his water taxi.
Hello.
- Hello, Philippe.
Climb into the boat.
- Are we already in Belen?
- Yes, we're in Belen.
This is where I live.
It's the rainy season.
The river is rising and there's water everywhere.
So I'll take you to my place by boat.
- [Philippe] Okay, let's go.
[engine roaring] [upbeat music] Belen lives according to the river's tantrums.
Every year it bursts its banks and reshapes the district and all of its activities.
At first sight, this suburb seems to have grown in an informal way, like an oil slick on the surface of the river, without any planned urban development or construction norms.
Frankly, it's pretty hard to get my bearings.
But I discover that it's organized into sectors with streets and numbered houses, and that it has a host of services such as schools and health centers.
[dog barking] In the suffocating heat and humidity, I notice that the inhabitants not only live on the water, but also in the water, where they carry out most of their activity.
Little by little, I discover an architecture and a lifestyle governed by the constant need to adapt to the vagaries of nature.
[children playing] Is that a soccer goal?
- Yes, it's the soccer field, but it's underwater.
[children playing] [Philippe laughing] - [Philippe] Is there a lower floor here?
- [Micher] It's a two story house.
- So the first floor was flooded and now everyone is living upstairs?
- Right.
[boat engine roaring] - [Philippe] The amazing thing is this system of pontoons and waterways, which allow the whole neighborhood to get around during the floods.
- This is a temporary bridge just for the winter.
People use it to get from one place to another.
In the summer when the water level drops, we remove the bridge and it becomes a street again, then motorbikes and scooters can pass through.
- It's crazy.
When you see the water like this, it's hard to imagine that four or five meters below there's a road and a totally different lifestyle in summer.
- For those of us raised here, it's normal.
We live in harmony with nature.
[children playing] [dog barking] - [Philippe] Micher lives in St John's Alley with his wife and three children in a house built entirely with materials collected in the forest.
- [Micher] And here's my home.
We built it five meters above ground, that way it won't get flooded.
- [Philippe] Hello.
- Welcome to my home.
- You built it yourself?
- Yes.
With various kinds of wood.
There's a bit of everything.
This is Pichirina and that's guacapu.
In the corner, it's quinilla.
- Lots of different species.
I guess the wood rots and you must replace it?
- Right, even hardwoods once they've been subjected to water, they end up rotting.
But this wood, palo sangre, it's very resistant to water, it lasts for years.
It's harder than iron.
- And the roof, are they palm tree leaves?
- Yes, from a palm tree known as irapay.
We plait them together so the rain can't get through.
Once plaited, we put them on the roof upside down and the rainwater just slides off, just like water off a ducks back.
[gentle music] There are other individual rooms.
I'll show you.
- Hello.
These are the bedrooms?
- This is mine and that's my son's.
- Hello.
[Philippe laughing] - [Micher] And this bedroom is for my daughters.
- You can tell by the decoration, it's really pretty.
Micher's home is pretty basic, just a plank floor resting on stilts with a few partitions to demarcate spaces and provide some intimacy, but thanks to this light structure and the choice of materials, the house is very well adapted to the geographical and climactic context.
I'm guessing the palm leaf roof also helps keep the place cool.
- Yes they do, but these leaves are becoming scarcer.
We have to go much deeper into the jungle to find them.
They used to grow around here.
I'll replace the roof because corrugated iron lasts much longer.
A corrugated iron roof can last for years, maybe 15 or 20 years.
You have to replace the palm leaves every two years and the price keeps on rising.
- It's really sad that just because of economic reasons you'll have to abandon these materials for more modern materials, which may not be so well adapted.
- You're absolutely right.
- Your living conditions might become quite complicated if you change all the materials.
- But you have to adapt.
Otherwise, where can we go?
Even if it's in corrugated iron, at least you've got a roof over your head.
[upbeat music] - [Philippe] Flood levels vary constantly, and this year, the river keeps on rising.
In a few days time, Micher's home will be flooded.
He's getting ready to move to a nearby floating house known as a casa balsa.
It's one big room floating on a raft of tree trunks, which have to be changed every year.
Micher's wife Leo is overseeing the move, making sure that everyone has a place and all their belongings.
- The kitchen will be here, Francis will be there, Sabrina there and the table here with the TV on it.
Everyone can have some private space.
[Leo laughing] We'll add a plank across the room.
This will go here like this.
- So the bed spring becomes the floor?
- We put a few of these up and the mattresses on top.
- Very ingenious.
- My daughter will be comfortable here.
The river can rise and flood our real home, but we'll be just fine here.
[Leo laughing] [upbeat music] - I'll pass the trunks through here.
- Like that?
- We get flooded every winter.
The big trunks under the plank floor rot, so I have to change them, it's the only way.
Thanks to our floating house, we can cope with the floods.
When the river rises, the floating house rises with it.
When it recedes, the house goes down too.
It was my wife's idea.
- You should always listen to your wife.
- That's for sure.
[Micher laughing] - It needs some weight to get it underneath.
Is it stuck?
It's through, I can feel it coming up.
It's coming up.
That's it, it's working.
- The trunks underneath.
All's well that ends well.
[Micher laughing] - Good job.
That was tough work.
I'm amazed by the architecture of this casa balsa.
It's like the people of Belen, inventive and skillful, constantly using strategy and cunning to deal with this hostile environment and avoid its pitfalls.
A real love story often complicated bonds the river and its inhabitants.
They live both with it and off of it.
[upbeat music] Everything takes place on or around the river, it's the major link between people, towns and communities.
As the main means of transport, it supplies the Belen market with all products from fishing and the forest.
[traditional music] - Welcome to Peru, Iquitos, Loreto.
It's our jungle music and our traditional dancing.
Dance, dance dance.
[people applauding] - [Philippe] The Belen market is a real hub where people can buy and sell products from the region and from Northern Amazonia, especially from Brazil and Columbia.
It feeds all the inhabitants of the city and guarantees a livelihood for thousands of fishermen, farmers and tradesmen.
[people chattering] - This is Chimbillo.
Try it.
You have to suck it, Philippe, but don't swallow the stone.
- It's tasty.
- That's lizard.
That's caiman.
And that's a piranha.
[Philippe and Leo laughing] It's okay, it's dead, that's why it's not biting you, but it would if it was alive.
[people laughing] That's cahua, a kind of catfish.
They're alive, look - I'm not sticking my finger in.
- They don't bite.
Go on, stick your finger in.
Don't be scared, Philippe.
- Okay, okay, I'll do it.
[Philippe cries] [all laughing] I get the impression that the people of Iquitos and Belen don't really mix that much, and that the market is actually the only place they can meet.
- Most people buy their groceries here because it's the biggest and the cheapest market.
That's why the people who live in the lower town and the upper town all come here, along with people who live in the center of Iquitos.
It's a meeting place, that's why it's so lively.
This market is a heart and soul of Iquitos.
- [Philippe] Without this market, Iquitos simply wouldn't exist.
[soft upbeat music] The city continues to attract new inhabitants, most of whom settle in Belen, but here, all urban development plans are made more difficult by the district's floodale geography.
And there are many problems.
The limited access to drinking water, waste water treatment, public transport, public health and even fire risks.
In 2012, a huge blaze wiped out part of Belen, since then, the state has set about building new homes.
Supposedly modern and practical, these houses turned out to be badly designed and not really adapted to the district's needs.
The flat corrugated iron roofs make it hard for rainwater to run away and increase the heat during the summer.
As for the wood, it's of poor quality and rots much faster.
- A really strong wind could blow these houses down.
The state had these houses built, but with blueprints drawn up in Lima.
So everything was worked out on paper.
I'm telling you, if carpenters or people from the area had built these homes, they wouldn't have done it like this.
They'd have built solid homes.
They'd have done a very good job.
[dramatic music] - [Philippe] Sylvia, who's a merchant lost everything in the fire and she can't afford to rebuild her house which was half destroyed, so she lives here with her eight children.
Tony, a volunteer fireman is visiting her to give some tips on fire prevention.
Hello.
- Hola.
The fire started when a gas bottle blew up.
All the surrounding houses caught fire.
It was really fast.
In two minutes, the whole place was full of smoke.
- I imagine that whether it's the dry season or the rainy season, access is the biggest problem?
- Most of the people who live here are street vendors and they block the entrance to the town.
Belen is closed off and has no access roads.
People build their homes wherever they like, not really assessing the dangers.
They're not aware of sanitation issues either.
The population is rising.
People are constructing with no respect of regulations, and the district is extending towards the river, that is the biggest problem.
- If it was possible, would you go live elsewhere?
- It would depend on where.
I'm a street vendor, I love my job and I love working at the port.
What I like most about Belen is what we who live on the riverbank do, trading.
If I lived farther away, it would be difficult to carry on.
I was born and raised here.
I like Belen.
I adore Belen.
[upbeat music] - [Philippe] Sylvia's courage and her determination to stay in Belen despite all the obvious difficulties are moving.
To fully understand Iquitos, I'll need to leave Belen and go up to the historical center of the city.
The contrast is striking.
I'm immediately struck by the well laid out streets and the buildings inspired by European architecture.
[motor engines roaring] Founded in the 17th century by Jesuit missionaries, Iquitos really began to grow in the 1880s with the rubber trade, which attracted thousands of migrants from Spain, Italy, Germany and Portugal.
It was during the 1970s with the discovery and extraction of oil that the city's population rose tremendously.
Martin, a historian and expert on Iquitos explains how the frenetic exploitation of natural resources for over a century by European migrants contributed to the city's development.
- This is the first known map of Iquitos.
It dates from 1886, which was the height of the rubber trade.
What we need you to understand is Jesuit missions were already structured in this way.
In many villages, there was a common central house, the maloca, sometimes in the form of a circle, whereas the missions were laid out like a grid divided into sections and that continued.
When the rubber trade started and they started constructing these buildings, they did so by following a configuration that was already in place.
- When you see this grid-like layout, you realize how the European settlers imposed their own social and spatial organization, which had no relation at all with what existed before and which enabled colonization?
- One Jesuit said all Indians had to be converted.
Firstly, from savages to humans then from humans to Christians, that was the basic concept.
You start by imposing a form of habitat, then how to structure a village, then a dress code.
After that, came beliefs, economic and ideological beliefs.
[upbeat music] During the rubber era, they started constructing European-style buildings with porcelain tiles, paved floors, iron work.
Everything was imported from Europe.
The center of Iquitos was a slice of Europe right in the middle of Peruvian Amazonia.
Take this building, for example, the Malecon Palace.
It's a mixture of totally eclectic styles, art nouveau, rococo.
And this completely reflects the mentality of the caucheros, who love to imitate the European style and implant it wherever they lived.
[upbeat music] - [Philippe] Martin is passionate about his hometown's history, but he's also extremely concerned about the future of Belen.
Over the past few years, the state has been trying to systematically move people out of the district so as to empty it, but without offering any real work or lifestyle alternatives.
Martin is collecting all sorts of information, which could serve as concrete arguments against this governmental decision.
- Alternatives need to be found to improve the lifestyle and wellbeing of the inhabitants without moving them elsewhere.
How can I put it?
I don't think Belen's problem is purely sanitary with urine and excrement.
Otherwise, how would the inhabitants of Venice cope?
And Belen is known as the Venice of Amazonia.
If they solved the problem in Venice, why can't we do it here?
All this construction is part of a gradual process over the past few years, but people don't just live here, they vibrate.
Their passions, their love, their parties, all of it's here, as are their pains, their sadness, their hardship, and their poverty, because life is made up of all of that.
The heart of Belen is the lower town, and Belen is Iquitos.
Without Belen there'd be no Iquitos, and without the lower town, there'd be no Belen.
[upbeat music] - This goes over here.
[Micher hammering] [wood creaking] [Philippe laughing] Is it holding up?
- It's perfect.
- Yeah, not bad.
- It's solid.
- Yep.
- It's great.
- [Philippe] Fantastic.
- This is life in Iquitos.
That's how the city is and there's nothing we can do to change it.
- [Philippe] To me, Iquitos is a particularly inspiring place.
The city itself tells us a lot about the history of Peru, that of the colonists who came to exploit the country's natural resources, imposing their way of life through architecture and the street layout, and that of the Amerindians, the people of the river and the forest, whose spirit still resounds in Belen.
It's this precarious district that amazed me most, a place where few people actually go and prefer to make up their minds from afar.
I leave here energized by the tenacity, intelligence and dignity of its inhabitants.
They have enough strength to keep their district vibrating.
Let's just hope that they're given the means to carry on.
[upbeat music] [child chuckling] [man and child laughing]
