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Iquitos was established as a Jesuit mission in the 1750s, and in 1864 it started to grow when the department of Loreto was created and Iquitos became its capital.
Iquitos was known for its rubber industry through the first decade of the 20th century, and there are still great mansions from the 1800's, including the Iron House, designed by Gustave Eiffel. The boom came to an end when rubber seeds were smuggled out of the country and planted elsewhere. The 1982 movie Fitzcarraldo, about the life of rubber baron Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, was filmed near Iquitos. There are also many floating houses on the Amazon and its tributaries. The "floating" neighborhood of Belen can be accessed via boat in the wet season (or by foot in the dry season).
Iquitos has become important in the shipment of lumber from the surrounding forest to the outside world, and it offers modern amenities for the residents and tourists in the area. Other industries include oil and distilleries. The city still retains much of its frontier quality.
Iquitos has a growing reputation as a tourist community, especially as a jumping-off point for tours of the Amazon jungle and the Pacaya-Samira National Reserve, and trips downriver to Manaus, Brazil - the other rubber-industry city in the interior of the Amazon basin - and finally the Atlantic Ocean, which is 3,360 kilometers away.