Napo

Napo River is a tributary of the Amazon River that rises in Ecuador on the sides of the Antisana, Sincholagua, and Cotopaxi volcanoes in the eastern Andes.

Before reaching the plains, it gets a large number of little streams from impassable, soaked, and heavily fractured hilly zones, where dense and varied vegetation appears to battle for every square inch of land. It receives a minor tributary from the west, the Curaray, which originates in the Andean foothills between Cotopaxi and the Tungurahua volcano.

The Napo is full of snags and shelving sandbanks from its Coca branch to the mouth of the Curaray, and it casts out innumerable canoes among jungle-tangled islands, which are flooded during the wet season, giving the river an enormous width. It travels over a wooded plain from the Coca to the Amazon, with no hills visible from the river and only swamps and lagoons interrupting its uniformly level banks.

The Napo is navigable for river craft up to its Curaray branch, a distance of about 348 km and possibly a little further; from there, its upper waters can be ascended as far as Santa Rosa.

Total Length: 702 miles (shared with Ecuador)