The name is Tupi and it comes apart cleanly: abá, man; eté, true; tyba, a group of them. A group of true men. The first recorded settlement in the area dates to 1635, when Capuchin friars from the convent of Una in Belém joined an Indigenous village called Samaúma — a community of people who had been moving through these channels long before any friar arrived, and whose village was later renamed Beja by the governor Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado. In 1724 Francisco de Azevedo Monteiro, a trader in Amazonian spices and forest goods, took a land grant on the Maratauíra River, sheltered from the worst of the tides by the island of Sirituba. That riverside claim became the town centre. It was known simply as Abaeté, split from the capital as its own municipality in 1880, was raised to city status in 1895, and took its current name by decree on 30 December 1943.

The miritizeiro palm — buriti, to most Brazilians — grows in flooded ground throughout the Amazon, and the pith of its leaf stalk is so light that Paraenses call it the natural styrofoam of the forest. A knife is enough to shape it. Carvers in Abaetetuba cut the stalks, dry them, and turn out helicopters, canoes, cobras, oxen, herons and Ferris wheels, then paint them in the hot reds, yellows and blues that Amazonian craft favours. The work is done in family workshops in the town and out on the islands, whole households carving and painting through the months before October, when the entire year's production travels downriver to be sold along the route of the Círio.

A miriti toy is not only a toy. In Pará, the little carvings function as ex-votos, offerings given in thanks to Our Lady of Nazareth for a promise kept — a recovery, a safe passage, a child born well. A person who asked for something and received it buys the object and carries it in the procession, and the toy that a child later plays with in Belém is the physical residue of somebody's answered prayer. It is a very Amazonian arrangement: the forest supplies the material, an inland town supplies the labour, and the largest Catholic procession in Brazil supplies the meaning.

Abaetetuba is the hub of the Baixo Tocantins region and the sixth most populous city in Pará, with about 158,188 residents counted in Brazil's 2022 census, spread across two districts — the town itself and Beja, now a riverside resort. Much of the municipality is not mainland at all but a scatter of islands laced with tidal channels, where families live by açaí, miriti and fish. The açaí harvest, climbed for by hand from slender palms, feeds both the local table and a national market that discovered the fruit only recently. Twice a day the tide reverses the current in the igarapés, and boats time their trips accordingly. This is a city whose streets are partly water, and whose most famous export weighs less than a handful of feathers.