The Japurá River or Caquetá River is a long river in the Amazon basin. It rises in Colombia and flows eastward through Brazil to join the Amazon River.

Course

The river rises as the Caquetá River in the Andes in southwest Colombia.

The Caquetá River rises near the sources of the Magdalena River, and augments its volume from many branches as it courses through Colombia.

It flows southeast into Brazil, where it is called the Japurá. The Japurá enters the Amazon River through a network of channels. It is navigable by small boats in Brazil.

West of the Rio Negro, the Solimões River (as the Amazon's upper Brazilian course is called) receives three more imposing streams from the northwest—the Japurá, the Içá (referred to as the Putumayo before it crosses over into Brazil), and the Napo. The territory of the Peruvian Amazon Company extended between the Putumayo and Japurá Rivers during the rubber boom.

thumb|"[[Eugène Robuchon|Robuchon’s party at the fatal rapids. Japura River."]]

Many of the indigenous nations between these rivers were enslaved by the Peruvian Amazon Company, which was originally founded by the Peruvian rubber baron Julio César Arana. Near the Caqueta River, the Andoque, Boras, Muinane, Manuya, Recigaro and other nations were forced to extract rubber at the Peruvian Amazon Company's stations. The Andoque workforce was largely based around the Matanzas rubber station, managed by the infamous Armando Normand

. The Boras people were primarily dedicated to rubber extraction around the stations of Abisinia, Santa Catalina and La Sabana correspondingly managed by Abelardo Agüero, Arístides Rodríguez and his brother Aurelio. Several writers that were contemporary to the rubber boom, including Roger Casement, noted that the Boras and Andoques nations were more resistant to enslavement and attempts by rubber tappers to conquer them. Joseph R. Woodroffe believed that their resistance resulted in those two indigenous nations suffering the most under the Peruvian Amazon Company's management and the near extinction of those two groups by 1910. Hundreds of indigenous people died while subjected to the Peruvian Amazon Company agents at Matanzas, La Sabana and Santa Catalina.

Environment

For much of its length the river flows through the Purus várzea ecoregion.

The river is home to a wide variety of fish and reptiles, including enormous catfish weighing up to and measuring up to in length, electric eels, piranhas, turtles, and caimans.

Much of the jungle through which the eastern Caquetá originally flowed has been cleared for pasture, crops of rice, corn, manioc, and sugar cane, and in the past two decades, particularly coca crops.

The 19th-century Brazilian historian and geographer José Coelho da Gama e Abreu, the Baron of Marajó, attributed of navigable stretches to it. Jules Crevaux, who descended it, described it as full of obstacles to navigation, the current very strong and the stream frequently interrupted by rapids and cataracts.