Anavilhanas Jungle Lodge in Brazil Is the Ultimate Family Adventure Destination

I grew up swimming in rivers and creeks in rural Pennsylvania, and now seek them out wherever I travel. I’ve jumped into rivers of all kinds, from the Maipo in the Andes to the Vltava outside of Prague. But nothing has compared to the exhilarating experience of plunging into the dark waters of the Rio Negro, a major tributary of the Amazon. I’ve spent many years writing about Brazil and its literature, and had been longing to see the Rio Negro. So my partner and our two sons arranged a trip to Anavilhanas National Park, a vast, pristine river archipelago in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.

Our arrival in August coincided with high-water season on the river, when submerged trees decay, intensifying its tealike color. (This decomposition also causes an acidity that impedes the breeding cycle of mosquitoes, eliminating the need for the malaria pills recommended elsewhere in the Amazon.) On our long flight from the U.S., I tried to share some context for the singular river-swimming ahead of us with our sons, ages 13 and 15. They responded with the briefest of nods before turning back to their screens. 

Our ultimate destination was Anavilhanas Jungle Lodge, on the banks of the Rio Negro. But after taking two flights to reach Manaus, the capital of Brazil’s Amazonas state, we would be needing a respite. Thomas Robinson of the luxury travel company Dehouche had expertly planned our entire trip and booked us in to Hotel Villa Amazônia, the sibling property of Anavilhanas. 

He also organized a morning tour of Manaus’s historic fish market, which gave us an up-close introduction to some of the more than 700 species that live under the surface of the Rio Negro. The 10-foot-long pirarucu, one of the river’s largest fish, has resided there since the Miocene epoch and is considered a “living fossil”: a species that has gone largely unchanged for millions of years. Once my sons had peered into its curiously reddish eye—and sipped their first juice from the tangy taperebá fruit—they felt with all their senses that we had arrived in a place unlike any other. 

Before leaving Manaus, a lively guide named Enilson Mesquita took us on a short boat ride to the Meeting of the Waters, where the inky, cool Rio Negro convenes with the warmer, sandier Rio Solimões to form the Amazon. The two rivers maintain their distinct properties for several miles, forming a bicolor ribbon that unfurls until the waters blend. The contrast is clear enough to be visible from space. Mesquita encouraged us to plunge our hands in and feel the shift in temperature as we passed from one river into the other. It was a science lesson coursing between our fingertips, one that no book or screen could convey.

That first contact with the Rio Negro left us eager to see more. A short seaplane ride took us 125 miles upriver to Anavilhanas Jungle Lodge, which sits across the river from the national park of the same name. The park consists of more than 400 islands and 60 lakes, and in 2003 was established as a UNESCO World Heritage site. This protected status means that the area’s remaining tropical hardwood trees continue to anchor the forest and its climate, both of which are crucial to the health of the Rio Negro and its many threatened and at-risk species—the black caiman, the Amazonian manatee, two species of river dolphin, and several of the largest electric fish on the planet. 

We took a motorboat through the flooded forest the afternoon we arrived at the lodge. Another family with teenagers joined us, and all five kids fell into a stunned silence as we entered a narrow waterway called an igarapé. Barely wider than our boat, it delivered us into a shadowy chamber of mirrors, where reflections of the immense trunks of half-submerged trees doubled on the river’s black surface. Low branches poked at the roof of our boat and brushed our arms. The touch of so many ancient, life-sustaining trees was otherworldly, as though we were floating into the conjured waters of a fantasy novel. 

We were entering this blackwater-flooded forest several weeks before it would begin drying up. Each September, as the river recedes, the lake we were going to becomes unreachable by boat. The lake brought our first sightings of the Rio Negro’s famed pink dolphins: a couple and its baby arcing together out of the water. Locally known as botos, they have a dorsal ridge instead of a fin. 

We spotted another boto family during our first glorious swim off the deck of the lodge later that afternoon. We dove in just before sunset, when the reddish tinge of the Rio Negro was more noticeable. I looked down at my arms below the surface and my skin appeared pink, as if in solidarity with the botos splashing nearby. 

With each sunset plunge over the next few days, I felt more linked to the botos and the choir of boisterous frogs that would sing out after each brief rainfall. A poem I translated years ago by the Brazilian writer Manoel de Barros, who grew up in the wetlands adjacent to the Amazon, came back to me. In the poem, the river near de Barros’s home becomes a verb. 

Where the river starts a fish,

river me a thing. 

River me a frog

River me a tree. 

I’ve never felt as thoroughly rivered as I did in the red-tinged waters of the Rio Negro. 

Our six days at the lodge allowed for a variety of excursions. João da Silva, who grew up in the Wapi Xana tribe, took us to the Madada Caves, about an hour’s hike from the lodge. He pointed out the change in light as we moved from a replanted forest to a primary one, where the trees dated back centuries. My older son noticed how the ground got spongier in the primary forest. Da Silva confirmed that the floor of the replanted forest had been hardened by the farming of cassava and the absence of deeper tree-root networks, like the immense angelim pedra tree we were about to see. 

Taller than a 20-story building, the pedra tree twisted up between two separate caves, its exposed roots as curved and elaborate as a Gilded Age chandelier. Long sunlit strands of vines hung from its branches. 

“Wow,” my younger son said—an apt expression of the hushed wonder we were experiencing. 

I’d had no idea what a sumptuous meal would be awaiting us at the lodge’s small, remote base, which is tucked into the jungle near the caves. It was a welcome surprise to reach a shaded expanse of patio with an L-shaped sofa and a small infinity pool. A local couple with a talent for cooking lives there, and they had grilled a tambaqui fish that was caught in the river, serving it with a salad of avocado, tomato, and cabbage, as well as rice and farofa, a side dish made from toasted cassava. Dessert included chocolate mousse and crisp slices of watermelon and pineapple. 

After this extraordinary banquet, time slowed. We cooled off by floating in the pool, watching a stream of yellow butterflies fluttering over the deck. A flock of herons perched on the branches of a nearby tree looked like white flowers—until they suddenly burst into flight. 

All the food served at Anavilhanas was exceptional. Every evening, the lodge assigns guests to different tables along the perimeter of a shaded deck overlooking the jungle. The menu changes daily, too, with flavorful Brazilian stews, freshly caught fish, and also comfort foods like fettuccine and hamburgers for my sons. For breakfast, they ate pancakes drizzled with doce de leite or a local honey with a lemony flavor. One night, we tried the lodge’s gourmet version of a Brazilian dessert known as Romeu e Julieta, which is a wedge of hard cheese paired with dense guava paste named for Shakespeare’s doomed lovers. At Anavilhanas, the cheese was whipped into a delicate mousse and coupled with a light guava jam. 

We noticed other thoughtful, inventive details in our cabins. Skylights in the showers offered views into the lofty trees. After dinner, the kids swung on hammocks strung across our glass-paneled patios, where they looked up at the squirrel monkeys that were also in motion, swinging toward the açaí berries at the tops of the surrounding palms. 

On our fourth night at the lodge, we reentered the intimate igarapés of the flooded forest in the dark. Our guide for the excursion, Krishna Rooplall, has worked with Anavilhanas since it opened 19 years ago. He cast the beam of his flashlight along the dark riverbank. In one sweep, he spotlit nocturnal eyes everywhere: three-toed sloths and boa constrictors in the trees, newborn caimans in the water, even the tiny eyes of two ladder-tailed nightjars, male and female, nestled together on a low branch of a tree, hiding from a snake hunting higher up. 

I asked Rooplall what had compelled him to stay so long at Anavilhanas. “I’ve worked in many other lodges,” he said. “This is an excellent one, building schools and teaching the new generation about ecology.” He remarked on the number of jobs the lodge had created in the area, offering viable alternatives to illegal logging and the sale of endangered turtles. 

The next afternoon, we visited a nearby riverbank community the lodge helps support. One of the older residents, Dona Neide, introduced us to a macaw that roosts in a tree beside her home. For 18 years, Neide has set out bananas and tucum, a local fruit, for the parrot, which she has named Sofia. “Vem, Sofia, a descer!” Neide called up. Down came Sofia, hooking her giant beak along the ridges of the tree trunk as we admired the incandescent blue of the feathers in her foot-long tail. 

The guide from Anavilhanas who had taken us to Neide’s village didn’t share much about the complexities of the community’s survival. When I asked Rooplall about this, he responded with a quiet smile. “We wait for guests to ask,” he said. “You have to be careful when you give people details.” Given the polarized political landscape in Brazil, he was reluctant to elaborate beyond alluding to “the government” and the dire, ongoing problem of elected officials’ selling off vast parcels of the Amazon for mining and cattle farming.

The lodge also helps support a nearby ranger station and funds ecological research in the area, including a recent study of fungi unique to the Rio Negro. Each room at Anavilhanas contains a book with close-up photos of their findings. Skimming images of local fungi added a delightful scavenger-hunt element to our jungle hikes. We spotted one variety that was similar in shape to the turkey-tail mushroom we see back home in New York, although here it was the bright orange of a parrot’s plumage. Another mushroom we saw at various times was entirely new to us, with caps as lacy and delicate as miniature parasols.

On our last day at the lodge, the four of us took canoes into the flooded forest for the final time. I relished the sight of my sons paddling together into the narrow igarapé with ease and familiarity. The submerged trees mirrored in the dark water no longer felt otherworldly. The rainforest along the Rio Negro had become our world, and we had become passionate about finding a role in its survival. 

A version of this story first appeared in the December 2025 / January 2026 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “High-Water Mark.”