Welcome to Tarapoto!
Tarapoto, known as the "City of Palms," is in the District of San Martín, "la tierra de las cataratas" (the land of waterfalls), on the high jungle plateau in the northern part of Peru.
Tarapoto is a commercial hub town in the San Martín Province of the Department of San Martín of northern Peru. It is an hour by plane from Lima, in the high jungle plateau to the east of what is known as the Selva Baja (low jungle). Although Moyobamba is the capital of the region, Tarapoto is the region's largest city and is linked to the Upper Amazon and the historic city of Yurimaguas by a relatively well-maintained transandean highway, paved in 2008–9. Tarapoto is approximately 356 meters (1,168 ft) above sea level on the high jungle plateau, also called the cloud forest. It was founded in 1782 by Baltazar Martínez Jiménez de Compagnon. According to the 2017 census Tarapoto has a population of 180,073 within the city limits, and over 130,000 inhabitants including the outlying Morales and Banda de Shilcayo districts, although in its metropolitan area it houses a little more than 200 thousand, which makes it the most populated city in the department and the third largest and most populated Amazonian city after Pucallpa and Iquitos.
Tarapoto is often used by tourists and local visitors as a base for excursions into the vast Amazon Rainforest. The region's main activities are tourism, commerce, agriculture, and an illicit "shadow economy" that includes the production of coca leaves, extraction of lumber, and trading in land concessions.
Tarapoto is home to the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, an important center of higher education serving the professional and technical needs of a region of high biodiversity. With its active nightlife, Tarapoto offers a wide variety of hotels and restaurants in and around the city. Moreover, the area's beautiful landscapes, waterfalls, and lagoons form a tempting location for adventure tourism, such as river rafting and hiking in the tropical Andes, and attract numerous visitors to the "City of Palms".
It is one of the main tourist and commercial centers of the Peruvian Amazon.
Its conurbation spans five districts: Tarapoto, La Banda de Shilcayo, Morales, Cacatachi and Juan Guerra.
The City of Palms concentrates a large part of the tourist and commercial activity in the region, and is the third most sought after and visited city by Peruvians, after Lima and Cusco, It is surrounded in the north by the regional conservation area of the Cordillera Escalera within the South American tropical humid forest and on the south by a fertile valley with crops of rice, corn, coffee, cocoa, tobacco, and various agricultural products, with seasonally dry forests Neotropical.
The city is known for its proximity to countless waterfalls, high jungle waterfalls, lakes, and lagoons, which makes it ideal for adventure sports such as hiking, kayaking, climbing, mountain biking, hiking, and high mountain sports.
The city is a neuralgic center of primary agricultural production products, the surroundings concentrate a wide and enormous endemic biodiversity, originating in the last foothills of the eastern Andes, these give rise to an enormous botanical and biological wealth, of an incredible variety of species of amphibians and birds, ideal for birdwatching, in addition to a large number of waterfalls, this led to a growth in ecotourism, mainly since the mid-nineties.
Currently, the Amazon metropolis has huge chains of hypermarkets, with services of all kinds, first-class hospitals, high-speed internet, luxury hotel services, resorts, hotels of all categories, motels and accommodations, The land connection in the mid-sixties brought enormous growth to the city, as a result of the construction and paving of access roads, from the capital city, Lima, connecting to the central highway in the central highlands and the Fernando Belaunde Terry highway in the north interconnected to the cities of Bagua, Chachapoyas, Chiclayo, Piura and Trujillo, and with proximity to the largest port in northern Peru, the port of Paita in the Pacific Ocean and the port of Salaverry in La Libertad, in addition from a connection to Brazil through the fluvial port of Yurimaguas, only about 3 hours away by road, and its departure to the Atlantic by the Huallaga River, a tributary of the Marañón River and east of the Amazon River.
In the last decade, the city maintained accelerated economic growth, as a result of the Tax Exemptions and Incentives Law that the Amazonian city enjoys, which has led to a growth of 6% similar to the regional one and higher than the national average, It has a very good land infrastructure and one of the best airports in the country and high air traffic, mainly a product of tourism and commercial growth, being one of the Peruvian cities with the largest floating population, after Piura, Iquitos and Cuzco is also known for its enormous gastronomic wealth, the production of liquors, tobacco, coffee, handicrafts, cocoa, chocolate, rice, organic fruit ice creams, fish farming, beekeeping, as well as the production of beef and pork (jerky and chorizo), and as a shamanic ayahuasca center, with a research laboratory (Takiwasi), a rehabilitation center for drug addicts and research on traditional medicines, it also has huge universities, both public (National University of San Martín) and private, with large campuses and university cities, with scientific and academic research typical of the Amazon region, The main economic activity is the co trade, tourism, agriculture, fishing, livestock, the processing industry of primary and agro-industrial products.