The Room 208 Blog

The Amazon, 12 times the size of the Mississippi River, is astonishing in any season. The river for much of its length is miles across, at points almost too wide to see the other side. Many Amazon garden hammocks are found nowadays.  At its mouth at the Atlantic Ocean, the river continues with such force that it can still be seen as a rushing stream of fresh water 60 miles out into the ocean.Much of the Amazon basin–4.7 million square miles of it–was once a huge inland sea. When the Andes rose at the west of the basin, the water gradually sloshed east, breaking through to the Atlantic and in time becoming a fresh water river.