Suellen Nunes*
There are young cities that run to look important. Belém doesn’t need to run. It watches and remembers. It knows how to wait. Founded in 1616, on the banks of Amazonian rivers that have always known more than maps, the city learned early on that time here is not a straight line: it’s a current.
Four centuries later, the city is still standing not because it has remained intact, but because it has changed. Belém has aged as living cities do, incorporating layers, mixing voices, accumulating stories that don’t always fit in books. The city was born a fortress, became a port, a market and the crossroads of the Amazon. It grew up listening to indigenous, African, European, northeastern and riverside footsteps. It learned to speak many languages without losing its accent. And perhaps that’s what time has given Belém: the ability to be old without being immobile.
Belém has also become a space for producing knowledge about the Amazon. For three decades, IPAM (Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia) has been building science from the region that is committed to the future of the forest and the people who depend on it. It is in Belém, an ancient and living city, that research, data and local knowledge come together to transform historical experience into solutions for the climate challenges of today and tomorrow.
The Belém of the modern era
Belém knows that modernity is not about erasing the past, but about dialoguing with it. It’s in the Ver-o-Peso that wakes up before the sun, where the Amazon translates into smells, colors and food, but also in the laboratories, universities and debates on climate, forest and the future that are born from Amazonian territory. It’s in the mansions that keep silences and in the peripheries that reinvent the city every day. It is in the science that is done here and in the wisdom that has always been here.
At 410 years old, Belém knows like few other cities the cost and value of the living Amazon. It knows what it means to live surrounded by rivers, to feel the weight of the tides, to depend on the forest and, at the same time, to see it threatened. This experience is not nostalgia, it is accumulated knowledge. It is historical and territorial capital for thinking about solutions in a world in climate crisis.
Celebrating 410 years of Belém isn’t about looking back with nostalgia, it’s about recognizing that the future is also born from what was experienced on the banks of the forest. That an ancient city can be, precisely for this reason, essential for imagining new paths for the Amazon and the planet. Belém reaches its 410th anniversary with its body marked by time and its head turned towards tomorrow. Old enough to know who it is, and alive enough to keep moving.
Analista de comunicação do IPAM*
