12 nights, San Juan to Manaus

The itinerary, port by port

9 calls over 12 nights, San Juan to Manaus. Open any port for my full day-ashore guide, what to see, when to go, and how the day actually runs.

Getting there: Flights to San Juan (SJU) are already bookable for these dates. I watch the fare for booked clients so you book at the right moment. When to book your flights →

1. Embark
   San Juan

   San Juan's old quarter is a walled Spanish colonial town on a headland, founded in the early 1500s, with two stone forts run by the U.S. Port guide →

2. 2
   Gustavia

   Gustavia is the harbor capital of St Barths, a small French island that has deliberately kept large cruise ships out, so only luxury lines anchor offshore and tender in. Port guide →

3. 3
   Saint-Pierre

   Saint-Pierre was Martinique's cultural capital, the Paris of the Caribbean, until Mont Pelee erupted on May 8, 1902 and a pyroclastic flow killed roughly 30,000 people in minutes. Port guide →

4. 4
   Bridgetown

   Barbados's capital is a UNESCO-listed Georgian port town wrapped around a careenage, with British colonial bones, a Parliament still in session, and a turtle-filled bay a short taxi away. Port guide →

5. 5
   Port of Spain (Trinidad)

   Port of Spain is the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, a genuine working Caribbean city rather than a cruise-built one, with a multicultural street life that shows in its food, its architecture, and its…

6. 6
   Macapá

   Macapá is the capital of Amapá state, sitting directly on the equator at the northern mouth of the Amazon, where the line literally runs through the city's Marco Zero monument and even through the midfield… Port guide →

7. 7
   Santarem (Pará)

   Santarem sits where the clear blue-green Tapajos River meets the silt-brown Amazon, a port city founded by the Portuguese in 1661 and one of the oldest in the Brazilian Amazon. Port guide →

8. 8
   Boca da Valeria

   Boca da Valeria is a tiny riverside village of roughly 75 people at the mouth of the Valeria River, about 850 miles up the Amazon near the Pará-Amazonas border. Port guide →

9. Disembark
   Manaus

   Manaus is the million-person Amazonian capital that grew rich on the rubber boom of the 1890s to 1910s and spent that money on European architecture set down in the middle of the rainforest, a thousand… Port guide →