Obidos

Óbidos lies on the northern bank of the Amazon in Brazil, at a narrow passage of the river. Indigenous communities lived along the river and its tributaries before Portuguese colonisation. In 1697 the governor of Grão-Pará ordered a fort at the constriction, where its guns could reach across the channel; construction probably began the following year. A Jesuit mission to the Pauxis was established near the Trombetas River in the early eighteenth century and was later moved to the fortified site. In 1755 the settlement became a town named Óbidos, after its Portuguese namesake. Its position made the river central to movement and control in the colonial Amazon, while the history of the surrounding Indigenous communities extended beyond the fort itself.