Corumba Travel Guide

Introduction

Corumbá looks like a city from a Jules Verne novel.

-- Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss

I'm not entirely sure what the great French anthropologist had in mind when he set down that thought about Corumbá back in 1933. My guess is that it was a comment on the city's otherworldly setting. Corumbá clings to a low cliff top, at the bottom of which, beyond the docks and riverboats, there begins a vast brown and green prairie of water that swirls and broods its way over the horizon, constrained finally by a distant smudge of low gray hills. Looking up from the river, or out from the city, Corumbá appears as the sole outpost of civilization in an otherworldly landscape of water.

It's a difficult place to reach. For hundreds of years the only travel route to Corumbá was by water, either across the Pantanal by canoe or up the Paraguay River by boat, through sometimes hostile Argentina and Paraguay. A railway linking Corumbá to Campo Grande wasn't built until the early 20th...