In the heart of the Amazon Basin, the place the borders and cultures of Peru, Colombia and Brazil converge, a tiny, shape-shifting island has develop into the unlikely setting for a diplomatic tug of warfare.
Santa Rosa is an island in the Amazon River. There’s no settlement on when it emerged from the water, however official settlement started in the Seventies. Today, it’s house to round 3,000 folks. But the land they reside on isn’t steady; Santa Rosa’s form and dimension shifts with the river’s circulation. Each 12 months, sandbanks kind and disappear, as the major channel carves new paths.
“If God wanted, the river would change and even Santa Rosa could disappear,” mentioned Gladys Hari Leiva, a lodge proprietor who has lived on the island for 21 years.
The island’s mercurial geography makes it a troublesome place to settle; households adapt season by season, strolling throughout sandbanks in the dry months, then paddling canoes by flooded streets when the rains come.
In latest years, as the Amazon has skilled droughts and unpredictable flood cycles, the patterns of change residents have grown accustomed to are shifting with the sands.
Yet regardless of these limitations, the island is coveted by the international locations round it. Peru and Colombia have argued over who the island belongs to for many years. As the Amazon River strikes, so too does the worldwide boundary between the two international locations.
An island that strikes
Santa Rosa has by no means been strong floor. The Amazon Basin builds and erases its personal geography by its rivers.
The major channel of the Amazon River continuously erodes present land and deposits new earth. Each 12 months the river carries roughly 1.2 billion tons of sediment from the Andes towards the Atlantic, reshaping its banks and islands because it flows. During high-water months, water spills over and settles throughout the floodplain, forsaking as much as 12 inches of recent soil yearly.
Residents who’ve lived in the Basin for a very long time are used to the seasonal ebb and circulation of the water and land, however it’s changing into much less predictable.
In the previous two years, historic droughts have left extensive dry patches the place deep channels as soon as flowed. According to Brazil’s Geological Service, water ranges throughout the Amazon River fell to document lows in 2023 and 2024, and the widespread affect can nonetheless be felt by river communities.
For Santa Rosa islanders, drought means adaptation: meals costs spike, touring turns into difficult, and some households quickly relocate to remain close to navigable water.
“We are used to the rises and falls,” Leiva mentioned. “But now you never know. The floods come at strange times, and the heat is getting stronger and stronger.”
It is feasible that droughts and floods can pace up erosion in some areas and construct wind up quicker in others, in line with Paulo Olivas, an ecologist and environmental scientist at Florida International University.
“That’s what makes the future of places like Santa Rosa so uncertain,” Olivas mentioned.
Santa Rosa’s fragility has not stopped Peru and Colombia preventing over it. In reality, its shifting shoreline has made issues worse.
The roots of the battle stretch again to the early twentieth century when the two international locations sought to outline their Amazonian borders.
Under the 1922 Salomón–Lozano Treaty, Colombia ceded massive tracts of Andean territory to Peru, whereas gaining the metropolis of Leticia — which sits immediately throughout the river from Santa Rosa — and its essential entry to the Amazon River. The treaty and the 1934 Rio de Janeiro Protocol set the border alongside the deepest navigable channel of the Amazon, a line meant to be pure and everlasting. But the river has by no means been static.
Over time, the shifting course of the Amazon created new islands and reconfigured the boundary, leaving new land, like Santa Rosa, that neither facet anticipated to exist.
“The island can appear, disappear, get bigger, get smaller,” mentioned German Vargas-Cuervo, adjunct professor at the National University of Colombia and a specialist in the geology and geomorphology of pure techniques. “The river moves and so everything that is inside the river is dynamic.”
Former Peruvian President Dina Boluarte visited the island in August. Her journey was lined by the Associated Press, which quoted her as saying, “Peru’s sovereignty is not in dispute; the district of Santa Rosa de Loreto is Peruvian and will remain so.”
Peru claims Santa Rosa as a result of many of the island’s inhabitants establish as Peruvian and it’s administered by Peruvian businesses. In 2025, the Peruvian authorities declared it a district, with the acknowledged intention of growing residents’ entry to public providers and “consolidating sovereignty.”
The nation additionally claims Santa Rosa was beforehand half of Chinería Island, territory granted to Peru underneath the 1922 Salomón-Lozano Treaty.
Colombia disputes this, contending that Santa Rosa didn’t exist when the treaty was signed and subsequently can’t be claimed underneath its phrases. Colombia additionally argues that the river boundary has shifted, inserting Santa Rosa in its territory. President Gustavo Petro lately criticized Peru on X for “appropriating” the island.
Despite its small dimension, Santa Rosa holds strategic and symbolic weight. It sits at the tri-border crossroads of Peru, Colombia, and Brazil — a key transit level for commerce and journey alongside the Amazon. In latest years, it’s additionally gained modest fame for its meals and tourism scene, drawing guests to riverside eating places.
Leiva is initially from Yauyos, Peru, and moved to the island for job alternatives in the tourism business. But regardless of its financial progress, Santa Rosa lags the international locations that declare it.
There is little infrastructure, and electrical energy has solely develop into obtainable round the clock in latest years. Sewage amenities stay largely absent, as is operating water, with residents counting on wells. Health care is precarious with little authorities help.
Some residents, like Leiva, think about Santa Rosa to be a paradise the place worldwide disputes really feel extra distant than the energy of the river. Markets overflow with blended currencies; a number of languages echo in the streets. Many locals maintain twin or triple identities, carrying Peruvian ID playing cards alongside these from Colombia and Brazil.
“Everything is calm here,” mentioned Leiva. “Every day we exchange cultures, currencies, and jobs.”
For now, life continues; kids go to highschool, households open retailers, and vacationers come for nature and meals.
But beneath that calm, the river retains shifting and reshaping the sand, grain by grain. The similar waters that maintain the island also can erase it, a reminder that life on the Amazon is as shifting as the river itself.