Bowtie 2 is geared toward aligning relatively short sequencing reads to long genomes. That said, it handles arbitrarily small reference sequences (e.g. amplicons) and very long reads (i.e. upwards of 10s or 100s of kilobases), though it is slower in those settings. It is optimized for the read lengths and error modes yielded by typical Illumina sequencers.
The docs are not entirely clear: