Pevas

The best place to stop for a night or two for those traveling downstream to Brazil [1] is Pevas, a laid-back village 145 kilometers downstream of Iquitos [2] that was founded by missionaries in 1735.

Pevas’s main attraction is La Casa del Arte, a huge thatched structure on the banks of the Amazon that serves as studio and home of Francisco Grippa, a well-known painter in the Amazon. Born in Tumbes [3] in the 1940s, Grippa attended art school in Los Angeles and somehow ended up in Pevas, where he paints the extreme beauty and destruction of the Amazon on canvases he makes himself from tree bark.

His work ranges from the mystical to the abstract, although his best-known works portray Amazon natives, animals, or landscapes with explosions of color reminiscent of Jackson Pollock. A sampling of Grippa’s work can be seen in the lobby of the El Dorado Plaza Hotel or at Camu-Camu, an art gallery at Trujillo 438 (tel. 065/25-3120).