ygapo

Updated: June 11, 2025

After passing these barreiros we continued our way along a low uninhabited coast, clothed, wherever it was elevated above high-water mark, with the usual vividly-coloured forests of the higher Ygapo lands, to which the broad and regular fronds of the Murumuru palm, here extremely abundant, served as a great decoration.

Henry Walter Bates - The Naturalist on the River Amazons

The tract of forest through which we passed was Ygapo, but the higher parts of the land formed areas which went only a very few inches under water in the flood season. It consisted of a most bewildering diversity of grand and beautiful trees, draped, festooned, corded, matted, and ribboned with climbing plants, woody and succulent, in endless variety.

Henry Walter Bates - The Naturalist on the River Amazons

These were of elliptical shape, considerably larger than those of a duck, and having a hard shell of the texture of porcelain, but very rough on the outside. They make a loud sound when rubbed together, and it is said that it is easy to find a mother alligator in the Ygapo forests by rubbing together two eggs in this way, she being never far off, and attracted by the sounds.

Henry Walter Bates - The Naturalist on the River Amazons

It is not too dense, and broad sunny paths skirted by luxuriant beds of Lycopodiums, which form attractive sporting places for insects, extend from the village to a swampy hollow or ygapo, which lies about a mile inland. Of butterflies alone I enumerated fully 300 species, captured or seen in the course of forty days within a half-hour's walk of the village.

Henry Walter Bates - The Naturalist on the River Amazons