Long before a European set foot on the coast, the territory of present-day Brazil was inhabited by millions of people spread among hundreds of peoples and dozens of language families. The oldest archaeological evidence, at sites such as Serra da Capivara (Piauí), pushes the human presence back at least twelve thousand years, and for some researchers much further. Far from a homogeneous mass, this was an extraordinary mosaic: specialists reckon that in 1500 more than a thousand different languages were spoken in the region.
Along the coast and the great rivers the Tupí-Guaraní peoples predominated —Tupinambá, Tupiniquim, Potiguara, Carijó—, farmers and warriors whose expansion from the heart of Amazonia was completed around the year 1000 of our era. Their language, Old Tupí, became the 'língua geral' of the first colonial centuries and left an indelible mark on Brazilian place names: names such as Ipanema, Paraná, Iguaçu, Maracanã or Guanabara are of Tupí origin. In the interior of the Planalto Central and the sertão lived the peoples of the Macro-Jê stock —Kayapó, Xavante, Bororo—, and in Amazonia dozens of Arawak, Carib and Tupí peoples organized around the rivers.
The archaeology of recent decades has knocked down the old myth of an 'empty' Amazonia incapable of sustaining complex societies. On the island of Marajó, at the mouth of the Amazon, the Marajoara culture flourished for almost a thousand years, famous for its refined funerary urns of polychrome pottery. In the Santarém region the Tapajó culture prospered, and all over the basin there appear geoglyphs, earthworks, roads and the famous 'terras pretas': dark, fertile soils created by sustained human activity, proof of a sophisticated management of the environment over centuries.
That dense and diverse world was laid waste by the conquest. The epidemics of smallpox, measles and influenza brought by the Europeans, against which the indigenous peoples had no defenses, killed the immense majority of the native population within a few generations, even long before the settlers arrived. To that demographic collapse were added enslavement and war. Today the indigenous peoples go on resisting —Yanomami, Kayapó, Guaraní-Kaiowá and so many others—, keepers of a heritage that is the first and deepest layer of Brazilian identity.
On April 22, 1500, the fleet of the Portuguese navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral, on its way to India, sighted Monte Pascoal in what is now southern Bahia and landed near Porto Seguro. Cabral took possession of the land in the name of the crown of Portugal and had a first mass celebrated. Under the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 —which divided the world between Portugal and Spain— the territory had already fallen within the Portuguese sphere, which explains why Brazil is today the only Portuguese-speaking country in the Americas.
During the first decades, the Portuguese crown, absorbed in the lucrative Asian spice trade, paid almost no attention to the new land. The only wealth exploited was brazilwood (pau-brasil), a tree from which a valuable red dye was extracted and which ended up giving the country its name. Extraction was carried out by barter: the Portuguese traded mirrors, knives and metal tools for the labor of the indigenous people, who cut the wood and carried it to the coastal trading posts. French and Dutch ships prowled those same coasts, disputing the business.
To secure possession against those rivals, from 1534 the crown organized effective colonization. It divided the coast into fifteen hereditary captaincies, broad strips of land granted to Portuguese nobles and merchants —the capitães donatários— who were to settle and defend them at their own expense. The system failed almost completely: only two captaincies, Pernambuco and São Vicente, prospered, while most succumbed to hunger, indigenous attacks and lack of resources.
Faced with that failure, in 1548 the crown created a General Government to centralize the administration. The first governor, Tomé de Sousa, landed in 1549 and founded Salvador da Bahia, which would be the capital of Brazil for more than two centuries. With him came the first Jesuits, led by Father Manuel da Nóbrega and, shortly afterwards, by the young José de Anchieta: tireless evangelizers, founders of São Paulo and São Luís, and defenders —in their own paternalistic way— of the indigenous people against the greed of the settlers.
Brazil's first great wealth was sugar. In the engenhos of the Northeast —above all in Pernambuco and Bahia, on the fertile coastal strip of the massapê— a plantation economy was built from the 16th century onward that made the colony the largest sugar producer in the world. It was a system of extreme brutality: the whole of social life revolved around the master's casa-grande and the slaves' senzala, in a regime that the sociologist Gilberto Freyre analyzed in his classic 'Casa-Grande & Senzala'.
Faced with the resistance of the indigenous people and the mortality caused by the epidemics, Portugal turned massively to the Atlantic trade in Africans. Over three centuries, close to five million enslaved people were brought to Brazil —the most cited studies put it at some 4.9 million disembarkations—, which made the country the largest destination of slavery in the whole history of the Americas: it received almost half of all the Africans who crossed the Atlantic. They came from Angola, from the Congo, from the Guinea Coast, from the Yoruba and Bantu lands, and out of their suffering and their culture came much of the Brazilian soul.
From that African population came the quilombos, communities of runaway slaves who organized themselves in the forested interior. The most famous was the Quilombo dos Palmares, in the Serra da Barriga in present-day Alagoas, which came to gather some twenty thousand people and held out for almost a century against the expeditions sent to destroy it. Its last great leader, Zumbi dos Palmares, became a symbol of black resistance: when in 1694 the troops of the bandeirante Domingos Jorge Velho razed the quilombo, Zumbi fought on until he fell in an ambush on November 20, 1695. That date is today Black Consciousness Day in Brazil.
The African heritage is one of the decisive matrices of Brazilian culture: candomblé and other religions of African origin, capoeira —a martial art disguised as a dance—, the cooking of dendê, and the rhythms that would be the root of samba. Salvador da Bahia is today considered the blackest city outside Africa. But that heritage lives alongside a structural inequality whose roots lie in slavery: the Afro-descendant population, which is the majority in the country, is still the hardest hit by poverty and violence, a historical debt that Brazil has yet to settle.
While the Northeast lived off sugar, the bandeiras set out from São Paulo toward the interior: expeditions of mixed-race explorers, the bandeirantes, who pushed for months or years into the sertão in search of indigenous people to enslave and of precious metals. Although their figure was mythologized as that of the pioneers who pushed Brazil's frontiers far beyond the Tordesillas line, the bandeirantes were also relentless slave hunters who destroyed the Jesuit missions of Guairá and Tape.
At the end of the 17th century, that search finally found its prize: the bandeirantes discovered enormous gold deposits in the 'general mines' of the interior, in present-day Minas Gerais. The greatest gold rush in the history of the Americas broke out. Tens of thousands of people —Portuguese, African slaves, adventurers from all over the colony— flocked to the region, and within a few decades rich and refined towns sprang up: Vila Rica (today Ouro Preto), Mariana, São João del-Rei, Diamantina, Sabará. The discovery of diamonds multiplied the bonanza.
Out of that wealth flowered one of the peaks of colonial art in the Americas: the Minas baroque, whose greatest exponent was the sculptor Antônio Francisco Lisboa, Aleijadinho ('the little cripple'), author of the soapstone prophets of Congonhas despite the disease that deformed his hands. Brazil's economic and demographic axis shifted from the sugar Northeast toward the mining Southeast, and in 1763 the capital was moved from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro, closer to the mines.
The Portuguese crown taxed the gold ever more heavily —the 'royal fifth'— and with the dreaded 'derrama', the forced collection of arrears. When the gold began to run out, the discontent of the Minas elite exploded in 1789 in the Inconfidência Mineira, the first great conspiracy for the independence of Brazil, inspired by the American Revolution and by the Enlightenment. Discovered and crushed, the plot produced a single death sentence: Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, an ensign nicknamed Tiradentes ('tooth-puller'), the humblest man in the group. He was hanged and quartered in 1792, and his body displayed in public as a warning. In time he became the great martyr and hero of Brazilian independence, and the day of his death, April 21, is a national holiday.
The story of Brazilian independence is unique in all the Americas. In 1807, Napoleon's troops invaded Portugal, and in an episode without precedent the entire Portuguese royal family —some fifteen thousand people, headed by the prince regent John— fled across the Atlantic under British escort. In March 1808, the court settled in Rio de Janeiro, which for thirteen years became the capital of the whole Portuguese Empire: the only case in history in which a colony housed the metropolis of a European empire.
The presence of the court transformed Brazil. The regent —later King John VI— opened the ports to trade with friendly nations (above all Great Britain) and founded the Bank of Brazil, the National Library, the Royal Press, the Botanical Garden and military and art academies. In 1815, to raise the status of the colony, Brazil was proclaimed a United Kingdom with Portugal and the Algarves. Rio ceased to be a colonial capital and became a true imperial one.
When the Liberal Revolution of 1820 broke out in Porto, the Portuguese Cortes demanded the king's return and sought to give Brazil back its old status as a colony. John VI returned to Lisbon in 1821 and left his son, prince Pedro, as regent. Pressed by the Cortes to return as well, Pedro stood his ground: on January 9, 1822, in the episode known as the 'Dia do Fico', he declared that he was staying in Brazil. It was the beginning of the break.
The following months were ones of growing tension with Lisbon. On September 7, 1822, while traveling from Santos to São Paulo, Pedro received new humiliating orders from the Cortes. On the banks of the Ipiranga brook he then proclaimed independence with the famous cry 'Independência ou Morte!'. Brazil did not fragment as Spanish America did: it was born united and as a monarchy. Pedro was crowned Emperor Pedro I. Portugal recognized independence only in 1825, after a compensation negotiated with British mediation, and some provinces of the north and northeast resisted by force of arms before joining the new Empire.
The Empire of Brazil lasted almost seventy years and was the only case of a lasting monarchy in independent America. Pedro I, authoritarian and entangled in Portuguese politics, abdicated in 1831 in favor of his son, then barely five years old, and returned to Europe. There followed a turbulent period of regencies, shaken by provincial rebellions such as the Cabanagem in Pará, the Sabinada in Bahia, the Balaiada in Maranhão and the long Ragamuffin War in Rio Grande do Sul. To halt the fragmentation, in 1840 the coming of age of Pedro II was brought forward, and at fourteen he took the throne.
Pedro II reigned for almost half a century, until 1889, and gave the country an institutional stability unusual in the region. Cultivated, austere and respected, he arbitrated between liberals and conservatives in a parliamentary system and turned Brazil into a South American power. Under his reign, the Empire, together with Argentina and Uruguay, won the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay (1864-1870), the bloodiest conflict in the history of South America, which left Paraguay devastated and strengthened the political weight of the Brazilian army.
The economy shifted toward coffee, which made the fortune of the Paraíba valley and later of western São Paulo, and turned Brazil into the world's largest producer. To replace slave labor, from the second half of the century a huge European immigration was encouraged —Italians, Portuguese, Germans, Spaniards— and later a Japanese one. The great question of the century, however, was slavery. Under British pressure and that of the growing abolitionist movement —with figures such as Joaquim Nabuco, André Rebouças and José do Patrocínio—, abolition came in stages: the Eusébio de Queirós law of 1850 banned the slave trade; the Lei do Ventre Livre of 1871 freed the children of enslaved women; the Lei dos Sexagenários of 1885 freed those over sixty.
The final blow came on May 13, 1888, when princess Isabel, regent in her father's absence, signed with a golden pen the Lei Áurea, which abolished slavery at last without any reparation or land for the freed. Brazil was the last country in the West to take that step. The measure, which ruined many slave-owning landowners, undermined the already scant support of the rural elite for the monarchy. Barely a year and a half later, on November 15, 1889, a military coup led by marshal Deodoro da Fonseca deposed Pedro II and proclaimed the Republic. The emperor left for exile in Europe, where he died in 1891.
The First Republic or República Velha (1889-1930) was born of a military coup, but soon fell into the hands of the rural oligarchies. The Constitution of 1891 established a federal, presidential regime inspired by the United States model, with a restricted vote cast out loud —the illiterate, women and most of the population were excluded—, which guaranteed the dominance of the regional elites.
Power was organized around the 'política do café com leite', the agreement by which the two most powerful oligarchies —that of São Paulo, a coffee producer, and that of Minas Gerais, a milk producer— took turns in the presidency. That pact rested on 'coronelismo': in the interior, the great landowners, the 'colonels', controlled the votes of their dependents through patronage and coercion, in what was called the 'voto de cabresto', the halter vote. President Campos Sales completed the system with the 'política dos governadores', an exchange of favors between the federal government and the states that shielded the oligarchies.
It was a time of sharp inequality and of social explosions. In the sertão of Bahia, the War of Canudos (1896-1897) ended with the army's massacre of thousands of followers of the messianic leader Antônio Conselheiro, a tragedy immortalized by Euclides da Cunha in 'Os Sertões'. In the south the Contestado War broke out; in the cities, revolts such as the Vaccine Revolt in Rio (1904) and the Revolta da Chibata of the black sailors (1910) laid bare popular discontent. The economy depended entirely on the international price of coffee, propped up artificially by the State through the purchase of surpluses.
In the 1920s the system began to crack. The tenentista movement —young army officers in revolt against oligarchic corruption, among them Luís Carlos Prestes and his legendary 'Column'— challenged the regime by force of arms. The Modern Art Week of 1922 shook the culture with a renovating aesthetic nationalism. And the world crash of 1929 sank the price of coffee and with it the old republic: when the São Paulo oligarchy broke the pact and imposed a candidate of its own in 1930, the south and the northeast rose up. The Revolution of 1930 put an end to the República Velha and brought to power a gaúcho politician named Getúlio Vargas.
Getúlio Vargas dominated Brazilian politics for a quarter of a century and marked the country like no other leader of the 20th century. He came to power in 1930 by revolutionary means, backed by the military and by middle classes fed up with the coffee oligarchy. Heading first a provisional government and then a constitutional one (1934-1937), he drove industrialization, the centralization of the State and a strong economic nationalism, in open rupture with the old agro-export model.
In 1937, on the pretext of a supposed communist threat, Vargas staged a self-coup, dissolved Congress and the parties and set up the Estado Novo, an authoritarian and corporatist regime inspired in part by the European fascisms, which governed until 1945. It was a dictatorship with censorship, political police and a cult of the leader, but also a period of intense state building: the Volta Redonda steelworks, the Companhia Vale do Rio Doce and numerous public companies and agencies were created, laying the foundations of Brazilian heavy industry.
Vargas's great social legacy was the world of labor. In 1943 he enacted the Consolidação das Leis do Trabalho (CLT), which gathered and expanded a vast body of labor legislation: the eight-hour day, weekly rest, paid holidays, a minimum wage, regulation of the work of women and minors. That pact between the State and urban workers, together with skillful propaganda, earned him the nickname 'father of the poor' and gave rise to 'getulismo', a populist current of enormous and lasting influence. In foreign policy, Vargas aligned Brazil with the Allies and sent an Expeditionary Force to fight in Italy during the Second World War.
The paradox of fighting fascism abroad while keeping a dictatorship at home became untenable: in October 1945 the military deposed Vargas and a democratic period opened. But the 'father of the poor' did not retire: in 1951 he returned to power, this time by popular vote. His second government, marked by economic nationalism —it was he who created the state oil company Petrobras in 1953 under the slogan 'O petróleo é nosso'—, ended in tragedy. Cornered by a grave political crisis and by military pressure to resign, Vargas shot himself in the heart at the Catete Palace on August 24, 1954, leaving a famous testamentary letter. His death turned him into a myth and shook the country.
After Vargas's death, Brazil lived through an intense period of developmentalist optimism. President Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961) launched an ambitious Plan of Goals under the slogan '50 anos em 5' (fifty years in five): he aimed to achieve in five years the progress of half a century through large investments in energy, transport and industry, attracting foreign capital that gave rise, among other things, to the car industry. It was the age of bossa nova, of the first World Cup won in 1958 and of a country that felt itself marching toward the future.
The supreme symbol of that drive was Brasília. Fulfilling an old dream already foreseen in the Constitution of 1891, Kubitschek moved the capital to the geographical center of the country, to the empty highlands of the Cerrado, in order to integrate the vast interior. The city was built from scratch in barely four years, with an urban plan in the shape of an airplane drawn by the planner Lúcio Costa and monumental architecture designed by Oscar Niemeyer. Inaugurated on April 21, 1960, Brasília is today the most complete example of modernist urbanism in the world and a World Heritage Site.
The dream broke soon enough. Inflation, social tensions and the Cold War radicalized politics. President João Goulart, who was pushing structural reforms —agrarian, educational, tax—, was seen by the elite, the Church, much of the press and the army as a communist threat. On March 31 and April 1, 1964, a military coup overthrew him and set up a dictatorship that would govern for twenty-one years, until 1985, backed by the United States in the context of the Cold War.
The regime tightened repression step by step. The turning point was Institutional Act No. 5 (AI-5), decreed in December 1968, which closed Congress, suppressed habeas corpus, imposed total censorship and began the 'anos de chumbo' (years of lead): the most brutal stage, with torture, disappearances and murders of opponents. In parallel, between 1968 and 1973 the country lived through the so-called 'economic miracle', with growth rates close to 11% a year and great infrastructure works such as the Trans-Amazonian highway, though at the cost of an extremely sharp concentration of income. The oil crisis, foreign debt and the return of inflation ended up eroding the regime, which began a slow controlled 'distension' and 'opening' from the mid-1970s.
The end of the dictatorship was the result of long and growing social pressure. In 1979, an amnesty law allowed the exiles to return and the parties and unions to reorganize; in the strikes of the São Paulo ABC industrial belt a young metalworkers' leader stood out, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who would found the Workers' Party (PT). In 1983 and 1984, the 'Diretas Já' campaign demanding direct presidential elections brought millions of people onto the streets in the largest popular mobilization since 1964.
Although the amendment for a direct vote was rejected, the dictatorship was already exhausted. In 1985, an electoral college chose as president the civilian opposition leader Tancredo Neves, but his death before taking office left the post to his vice president, José Sarney, with whom the New Republic began. The process culminated in the Constitution of 1988, the 'Citizen Constitution', which enshrined a broad catalogue of social rights, and in the first direct presidential elections in almost three decades, in 1989, won by Fernando Collor de Mello.
The young democracy set off with a chronic hyperinflation that came to exceed 80% a month and devoured wages. Collor fell in 1992, removed for corruption after an impeachment process. Stabilization came with the Real Plan of 1994, designed by the finance minister Fernando Henrique Cardoso, which introduced a new currency —the real— and finally tamed inflation. Cardoso was elected president that year and governed for two terms (1995-2002), with privatizations and macroeconomic stability but also a heavy social cost.
In 2002, after three electoral defeats, Lula da Silva finally reached the presidency: for the first time, a metalworker born into the poverty of the northeastern sertão came to power. His governments (2003-2010) combined economic orthodoxy with powerful social programs —above all Bolsa Família— which, together with a favorable cycle of commodity prices, lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty and expanded consumption. Brazil gained international weight as part of the BRICS and consolidated its place as one of the largest economies on the planet. Lula left power in 2010 with very high popularity and his chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, became the first woman president in the country's history.
The Brazil that entered the new century was an economic giant and a consolidated democracy, but also a country of deep contradictions. It hosted the football World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, two great international showcases. Yet those same years brought a political and economic crisis of enormous scale that tested its institutions.
The gigantic corruption scandal known as Lava Jato, which broke in 2014 around Petrobras and the country's largest construction firms, splashed much of the political class. In 2016, amid a severe recession and sharp polarization, president Dilma Rousseff was removed through a controversial impeachment process, and her vice president Michel Temer took office. Lula himself was convicted and imprisoned in 2018 as part of Lava Jato, in a judicial process whose validity would later be annulled by the Supreme Court.
Polarization brought the far-right Jair Bolsonaro to power in 2019; his government was marked by conservatism in matters of custom, the weakening of environmental policy —with a sharp rise in Amazon deforestation— and a denialist handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost the country hundreds of thousands of deaths. In 2022, in extremely tense elections, Lula returned to the presidency by a narrow margin, and his victory was followed, on January 8, 2023, by a Bolsonarist assault on the seats of the three branches of government in Brasília that recalled the attacks on the United States Capitol.
With more than two hundred million inhabitants, five times football world champion and a culture that radiates to the entire world, Brazil remains the great power of Latin America and a key piece of the global south. But it carries enormous challenges: one of the greatest inequalities on the planet, urban violence, the historical debt to its black and indigenous population and, above all, the fate of Amazonia, whose conservation has become a decisive question for the future of the world's climate. Between the rainforest and the megalopolis, between wealth and destitution, the South American giant goes on writing, to its unmistakable rhythm, a history that began millennia ago.
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Long before the word 'Acre' appeared on any map, this southwestern corner of Amazonia was inhabited by dozens of indigenous peoples, many of them of the Pano language family: the Huni Kuin (Kaxinawá), Yawanawá, Shanenawá, Yaminawá, and also the Arawak-speaking Ashaninka, among others. They were organized around the Juruá and Purus rivers and their tributaries, in a territory of dense forest and difficult access that still shelters some of the last peoples living in voluntary isolation on the planet.
The arrival of the seringueiros at the end of the 19th century shattered that world. The so-called 'correrías' —armed expeditions to open up and occupy the seringais— brought massacres, displacement and the fragmentation of entire peoples, who fled toward the headwaters of the rivers or ended up subjected to the labor regime of the rubber bosses. The memory of that violence and the later struggle for the demarcation of their lands are a central part of Acrean indigenous identity, recognized today in numerous Terras Indígenas.
By around 1880, the Industrial Revolution and the young automobile industry sent world demand for rubber soaring, and western Amazonia —rich in Hevea brasiliensis trees— became a coveted frontier. Thousands of Northeasterners, above all cearenses fleeing the great drought of 1877-1879, pushed into the forest as seringueiros, rubber tappers, extracting the latex known as 'white gold'.
The problem was that those lands, under the Treaty of Ayacucho of 1867, belonged to Bolivia. The Brazilian tappers came to make up the overwhelming majority of the population, but the Bolivian government tried to impose its tax and customs control over a remote region that was hard to reach. The tension between the Brazilian settlers and the Bolivian authorities —made worse when Bolivia tried to lease the territory to an international consortium, the Bolivian Syndicate— made the explosion inevitable.
Between 1899 and 1903 there was a succession of uprisings by the seringueiros against the Bolivian administration, in what became known as the Acrean Revolution. The decisive figure was José Plácido de Castro, a gaúcho from Rio Grande do Sul who had fought in the Federalist Revolution and worked as a surveyor in the region; he organized tappers, traders and forest workers into an improvised army that took control of the territory and went so far as to proclaim a short-lived Independent State of Acre.
The conflict was settled by diplomacy thanks to the skill of the Baron of Rio Branco, the Brazilian foreign minister. On November 17, 1903 the Treaty of Petrópolis was signed in Petrópolis, by which Bolivia ceded Acre to Brazil in exchange for two million pounds sterling, the cession of some lands and a commitment to build the Madeira-Mamoré railway, which was to give Bolivia an outlet to the Atlantic. The document is considered the true 'birth certificate' of Brazilian Acre.
Once incorporated into Brazil, Acre did not obtain political autonomy right away: for almost six decades it was administered as a Federal Territory, governed directly from Rio de Janeiro and later from Brasília. Rio Branco, on the banks of the Acre river, established itself as its capital and administrative center.
Full autonomy came only on June 15, 1962, when president João Goulart signed Federal Law No. 4070, which raised Acre to the rank of a state of the federation. That date is celebrated every year as the anniversary of the state, and June 15 was engraved as the day on which 'a people won its place in Brazil'. The state took on an identity proud of its origin: that of a land that was not conquered by the crown, but incorporated by the will and the work of its own settlers.
Acre gave the world Francisco Alves Mendes Filho, 'Chico Mendes', born in 1944 on a seringal near Xapuri. A seringueiro himself, he became a union leader and organized the rubber tappers in defense of the forest and of their way of life against the advance of deforestation and cattle ranching. His method was the 'empates': collective, non-violent actions —the first in Brasiléia in 1976— in which men, women and children stood in front of the chainsaws to stop the felling.
Chico Mendes proposed the extractive reserves, a model that allowed communities to live off the forest without destroying it, and he took his cause to international forums. His murder on December 22, 1988, at the hands of landowners at his house in Xapuri, turned him into a martyr and a worldwide symbol of environmentalism. His legacy gave rise to the creation of extractive reserves that today protect millions of hectares.
Acre is today one of the most heavily forested states in Brazil, with most of its surface covered in rainforest and a strong presence of extractive reserves, indigenous lands and conservation units. Rio Branco, the capital, works as the gateway to an Amazonian world where the legacy of rubber, the culture of the first peoples and an economy trying to reconcile development and conservation live side by side.
The state borders Peru and Bolivia, which gives it a cosmopolitan, crossroads character: the Interoceanic highway connects it with the Pacific, and its cooking, its music and its accent mix Northeastern, Amazonian and Andean influences. To visit Acre is to walk through museums devoted to the Acrean Revolution and to Chico Mendes, to travel forest rivers and to understand a singular chapter of Brazilian history: that of the last great frontier to be brought into the country.
Alagoas —whose name refers to the Mundaú and Manguaba lagoons that pierce its coastline— was for centuries part of the captaincy of Pernambuco, the richest in colonial Brazil. Like the whole sugar Northeast, its economy was built on the cane engenhos and slave labor: the fertile coastal strip filled with plantations producing sugar for export to Europe, in a society rigidly divided between mill masters and enslaved Africans.
The region was also a theater of the fight against the Dutch, who occupied the Northeast between 1630 and 1654: armies advanced and fell back across its lands, and they were left marked by the war. That sugar past left a visible legacy in towns such as Marechal Deodoro —the old town of Alagoas, the first capital— and in a deeply Afro-Brazilian culture.
In the ranges of the Alagoan interior, in the Serra da Barriga (today the municipality of União dos Palmares), the Quilombo dos Palmares rose at the end of the 16th century, the largest community of runaway slaves in the history of the Americas. At its height, around the 1690s, it came to gather between 11,000 and 20,000 inhabitants in a network of villages (mocambos) that held out for almost a century against the Portuguese and Dutch expeditions sent to destroy it.
Its most famous leader was Zumbi dos Palmares, born in the Serra da Barriga around 1655. Around 1678 he rejected the peace offer the authorities had negotiated with the previous leader, Ganga Zumba, and led the final resistance. The Republic of Palmares was razed in 1694; Zumbi held out for another year, until he was ambushed and killed on November 20, 1695, and his head displayed in Recife as a warning. Today Zumbi is a national hero of black consciousness, and November 20 is commemorated all over Brazil as Black Consciousness Day.
Alagoas won its autonomy in stages: in 1711 it was constituted as a comarca within Pernambuco, and on September 16, 1817 —after the Pernambucan Revolution— King John VI split it off to turn it into an independent captaincy, later a province of the Empire. The first capital was the town of Alagoas (today Marechal Deodoro), but the growth of the sugar port of Maceió led to the capital being moved there for good on December 9, 1839.
Despite its small size, Alagoas gave Brazil political figures of the first rank. It was the birthplace of marshal Floriano Peixoto, the 'Iron Marshal' who was the second president of the Republic and consolidated the republican regime; from Marechal Deodoro da Fonseca came the family of the man who proclaimed the Republic himself; and, already in the 20th century, of the former president Fernando Collor de Mello, the first head of state elected by direct vote after the dictatorship and later removed by impeachment in 1992.
The African heritage runs through the culture of Alagoas. Out of religious syncretism came Afro-Brazilian cults, and out of popular folklore came forms such as the guerreiro, the coco de roda and the dances of the coast. In the kitchen, the great emblem is the sururu, a small mollusk fished in the lagoons of Maceió and cooked in broths and stews that define the culinary identity of the capital.
That cultural mixture lives alongside a strong tradition of craftwork —the filé lace of the fishing communities, woven on the shores of the lagoons— and with the living memory of Palmares, which makes Alagoas a central place in the story of black resistance in Brazil. Maceió, between the sea and the Mundaú lagoon, combines city beaches, craft markets and the relaxed rhythm of the Northeast.
The great tourist treasure of Alagoas is its coastline. The Costa dos Corais, the largest coral reef barrier in Brazil, shelters a stretch of sea where natural pools of transparent water form: at Maragogi, the galés —pools several kilometers offshore— have become a tourist magnet, and their shades of green and turquoise earned the state the nickname of the 'Brazilian Caribbean'.
To the north, the Rota Ecológica strings together fishing villages that are almost untouched, such as São Miguel dos Milagres, where low-impact tourism coexists with mangroves, coconut palms and reefs. The combination of history —Palmares, the sugar mills, the lagoons— with this exceptional coast makes Alagoas one of the most singular destinations in the Northeast, able to offer the traveler both memory and paradise.
Amapá, in the northeastern corner of Brazil, between the mouth of the Amazon and Guiana, was for centuries a frontier in dispute. France, established in neighboring Guiana, claimed the territory, and through the 17th and 18th centuries the Portuguese and the French fought over a land of forest, mangroves and floodplains inhabited by indigenous peoples and, later, by quilombola communities of runaway slaves.
Before the Europeans arrived, the region was home to notable indigenous cultures, such as those that produced Marajoara pottery and the archaeological sites of the northern Amazon —including the so-called 'Amapá Stonehenge', the megalithic observatory of Calçoene—, evidence of complex societies that lived in these lands long before national borders were drawn.
To secure possession against the French, the Portuguese crown raised the imposing Fortress of São José de Macapá, whose construction began in 1764 and was completed in 1782. It was the largest Portuguese work in all of Amazonia and one of the largest colonial fortifications in Brazil, its walls of stone and brick pointing toward the great river.
Macapá grew up around the fortress and would become the capital of the state. Building a work on such a scale in so remote a place shows the strategic importance Portugal attached to this corner of its empire: whoever controlled the mouth of the Amazon controlled the gateway to the whole basin.
The dispute with France over the border between French Guiana and Amapá —known as the 'Amapá Question' or the Franco-Brazilian Contestado— dragged on through the 19th century and came close to turning into armed conflict. The dispute was finally submitted to international arbitration, with the president of the Swiss Confederation as arbitrator.
On December 1, 1900, the Bern award ruled in favor of Brazil, thanks in good part to the brilliant diplomatic case made by the Baron of Rio Branco, who assembled overwhelming historical and cartographic documentation. The ruling definitively brought into Brazilian territory some 260,000 km² that had been in dispute. It was one of the great victories of Brazilian diplomacy, which within a few years —with Acre as well— consolidated the country's northern borders by peaceful means.
In the middle of the Second World War, by Decree-Law No. 5812 of September 13, 1943, the region was detached from the state of Pará and constituted as the Federal Territory of Amapá. Shortly afterwards, in 1945, the discovery of rich manganese seams in the Serra do Navio transformed the local economy: for decades, manganese mining —worked by the company ICOMI— was the territory's main source of wealth and prompted the building of a railway to the port of Santana.
Macapá, the capital, has the peculiarity of being crossed by the line of the equator, marked at the Marco Zero and at the stadium popularly known as the 'Zerão', whose pitch is split between the two hemispheres. Amapá was finally raised to the rank of state by the Constitution of 1988, completing its long road from colonial fortress to full federal unit.
Amapá is one of the most pristine states in all of Amazonia. A huge part of its surface is protected in conservation units, with the Tumucumaque Mountains National Park as the main jewel: created in 2002, it is one of the largest protected areas of continuous tropical rainforest in the world, an almost unexplored sanctuary in the border range that divides the waters of the Amazon basin.
Its coast of mangroves and floodplains, where the Amazon merges with the Atlantic, and the strong presence of quilombola and indigenous communities make Amapá a territory of frontier and almost untouched nature. At the river mouth there is also the pororoca, a tidal wave that roars its way upriver. For the traveler, the state is one of the last great wild frontiers of Brazil.
The state of Amazonas, the largest in Brazil —bigger than many countries—, is the heart of the largest rainforest on the planet. For millennia it was inhabited by dozens of Indigenous peoples organized around the great rivers: Tikuna, Baré, Sateré-Mawé, Yanomami, and in the Rio Negro basin alone as many as twenty-three peoples from language families such as Tukano, Arawak, Yanomami and Makú. Far from being an empty space, pre-Columbian Amazonia was home to complex riverine societies, with forest management, elaborate pottery and extensive exchange networks.
The Portuguese pushed into the region from the seventeenth century onward, disputing control of the Amazon with Spain and other powers. In 1669 they founded the Forte de São José da Barra do Rio Negro, on the site where Manaus would later grow, to secure possession of the great river. Missionaries and settlers moved up the waterways, and evangelization, Indigenous enslavement and epidemics changed the world of the original peoples forever.
Between 1880 and 1912, Amazonian rubber —the latex of the seringueira, indispensable to the tire industry— set off an economic fever that turned Manaus into one of the richest cities in the world. The 'rubber barons' amassed colossal fortunes and wanted a city to match the European capitals: they paved streets and installed electric trams and running water when many European cities still had none.
The symbol of that opulence was the Teatro Amazonas, inaugurated in 1896 on the Largo de São Sebastião: a lavish opera house with a tiled dome, Carrara marble, Murano glass and Scottish iron, raised in the middle of the rainforest in the taste of the Belle Époque. The boom collapsed around 1912, when smuggled rubber seeds made it possible to establish cheaper plantations in Southeast Asia, and the region sank into a long decline. The Theater was declared National Historic Heritage by IPHAN in 1966.
Off Manaus takes place one of the most famous natural phenomena in Amazonia: the Meeting of the Waters, where the dark, warm waters of the Rio Negro run for some six kilometers alongside the muddy, cold waters of the Solimões river without ever mixing, forming a sharp two-colored line. The cause lies in the differences in temperature, density, speed and acidity of the two rivers.
Downstream from that point, the two flows finally merge and properly give rise to the Amazon river. The Meeting of the Waters is the capital's main tourist attraction and a reminder of the sheer scale of Amazonian hydrography, where the rivers are true seas of fresh water.
After decades of post-rubber decline, the federal government set out to revive the Amazonian economy with a bold model. The Manaus Free Trade Zone, whose initial regulation dates from 1957 and which was recast by Decree-Law No. 288 of February 28, 1967 —signed by President Castelo Branco—, established tax incentives to set up an industrial hub in the middle of the rainforest.
The result was a radical transformation: Manaus filled with factories making electronics, motorcycles and consumer goods, attracted hundreds of thousands of migrants from all over the country and became a metropolis of more than two million people. The Manaus Industrial Hub is today one of the largest industrial parks in Latin America, and the Free Trade Zone is defended as a tool that, by concentrating economic activity in the city, helps preserve the surrounding forest.
The culture of Amazonas is a living blend of Indigenous, Portuguese and Northeastern roots. Its most spectacular festival is the Parintins Festival, in which two rival 'bumbás', Garantido and Caprichoso, stage every June a giant duel of music, dance and floating allegorical figures in a bull-shaped stadium (the 'Bumbódromo'), a celebration that gathers tens of thousands of people on an island in the middle of the river.
Amazonian cooking is equally singular: tucumã, tambaqui, farinha de mandioca, the guaraná native to the Sateré-Mawé, and river fruits and fish that exist nowhere else in Brazil. The legends of the forest —the Boto, the Iara, the Curupira— fill the popular imagination, a direct inheritance from Indigenous mythology.
The state still holds enormous stretches of virtually untouched rainforest, protected in parks such as Jaú —a Unesco World Heritage Site— and in dozens of reserves and Indigenous lands. Municipalities like Presidente Figueiredo, the 'land of waterfalls', or the rivers and lakes around Manaus offer the traveler direct contact with the greatest biodiversity on the planet: pink river dolphins, giant water lilies, countless birds and the chance to sleep in lodges deep in the forest.
In the twenty-first century, Amazonia has become the center of a worldwide debate about climate, deforestation and the rights of Indigenous peoples. The state of Amazonas, with its combination of rainforest, gigantic rivers and a one-of-a-kind industrial capital, embodies the tensions and the hopes of that debate, and remains one of the most fascinating and challenging destinations in all the Americas.
The coast of Bahia was the setting for the European 'discovery' of Brazil: on April 22, 1500, the fleet of Pedro Álvares Cabral sighted land off Monte Pascoal, in what is now the south of the state, near Porto Seguro, beginning the European colonization of this part of South America. Before that date, the region was inhabited by Tupi peoples such as the Tupinambá, farmers and warriors of the coast.
Half a century later, in 1549, the first governor general Tomé de Sousa founded Salvador, on the Bay of All Saints, to give the colony a central government. Salvador was the first capital of Brazil and remained so for more than two centuries (1549-1763), the most important city in the colony, seat of the government, of the bishopric and of the great Atlantic port.
Bahia's great colonial wealth was sugar, grown in the Recôncavo, the fertile band of land ringing the Bay of All Saints. From the sixteenth century, cane became the central product of the colonial economy: the Recôncavo filled with engenhos and turned into one of the most populous and productive regions in all of Portuguese America, exporting sugar, tobacco and cassava.
Recôncavo towns such as Cachoeira and São Félix flourished on this trade, and the landscape came to be dominated by the mill owner's casa-grande and the senzala of the enslaved. That social structure —masterfully described by Gilberto Freyre— left a permanent mark on Brazilian culture. Sugar made Bahia the economic jewel of the Portuguese empire for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Bahia was the great port of entry of Atlantic slavery: over three centuries hundreds of thousands of Africans arrived, above all from Yoruba (Nagô) and Bantu cultures. From that heritage was born the core of Afro-Brazilian culture: candomblé and its orixás, capoeira —a martial art disguised as dance—, the acarajé of the baianas, the rhythm of axé and of samba de roda.
Salvador is today the 'blackest' city in Brazil outside Africa, with the largest Afro-descendant population in the country. Its historic center, the Pelourinho, with its colorful colonial mansions and gilded baroque churches, was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1985. In its streets Catholic faith, candomblé and a cultural vitality that has given the world musicians like Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa and Dorival Caymmi all live side by side.
Although Brazil proclaimed its independence on September 7, 1822, in Bahia the Portuguese troops held out entrenched in Salvador. The struggle, with episodes such as the resistance of the heroine Maria Quitéria, dragged on for almost a year, until on July 2, 1823 the Portuguese troops evacuated the city. That date —and not September 7— is the great civic holiday of Bahians, who celebrate it as the day independence became real in blood and not only in a shout.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the sertão of the interior was the scene of one of the most famous tragedies in Brazilian history: the War of Canudos (1896-1897). In the arid backlands, the millenarian preacher Antônio Conselheiro gathered some 30,000 followers into an autonomous community that rejected the newly proclaimed republic. The army sent four successive expeditions until Canudos was razed; the massacre was immortalized by Euclides da Cunha in 'Os Sertões', a founding work of Brazilian literature.
Inland rises the Chapada Diamantina, the northern portion of the Serra do Espinhaço, a massif of canyons, plateaus, waterfalls and caves. Its modern history began in the nineteenth century, when the discovery of diamonds drew prospectors, traders and adventurers who founded towns such as Lençóis, Mucugê and Andaraí. Those garimpeiro villages lived a fleeting boom and today preserve a faded charm of stone mansions.
Once the diamonds ran out, the Chapada reinvented itself as one of Brazil's great trekking and ecotourism destinations, partly protected by the Chapada Diamantina National Park. Morro do Pai Inácio, the Fumaça waterfall —one of the tallest in the country—, the Poço Azul and the Vale do Pati draw hikers from all over the world to a landscape of overwhelming beauty.
With more than a thousand kilometers of coastline, Bahia offers some of the most famous beaches in Brazil. South of Salvador lie the island of Tinharé, with Morro de São Paulo and neighboring Boipeba; bohemian Itacaré, on the Costa do Cacau, between Atlantic forest and surf; and the Costa do Descobrimento, with Porto Seguro, Arraial d'Ajuda and chic Trancoso, exactly where Cabral made landfall in 1500.
To all this add the culture it radiates across the country: dendê cooking —moqueca, vatapá, caruru—, the Salvador Carnival, considered the largest street party in the world, with its trios elétricos and Afro blocos such as Olodum. History, sea and culture make Bahia one of the most complete and emblematic states in Brazil: literally, the place where the country began.
Ceará was inhabited by Indigenous peoples such as the Tabajara, Potiguara and Tremembé, who put up fierce resistance to colonization. The Portuguese were slow to master the region: effective occupation was not consolidated until the seventeenth century, and the economy turned toward extensive cattle ranching in the sertão and, later, toward cotton.
The interior of Ceará is semi-arid sertão, battered by historic droughts that shaped its culture, its cordel literature and its social history. Those droughts —such as the one of 1877-1879, one of the most devastating— pushed thousands of cearenses to migrate to Amazonia during the rubber boom, making Ceará the main supplier of seringueiros to Acre. On the coast, meanwhile, fishermen kept alive the tradition of the jangada, the sailing raft they still take out to sea today.
Ceará holds a place of honor in the history of freedom in Brazil: on March 25, 1884, four years before the national Lei Áurea, it became the first Brazilian province to abolish slavery completely. The act was sealed in the Station Square of Fortaleza, under the provincial presidency of Sátiro Dias, and placed the state at the moral vanguard of the country.
The great symbol of that feat was Francisco José do Nascimento, nicknamed the 'Dragão do Mar': a pardo jangadeiro of humble origins, in 1881 he led the strike of the jangadeiros, who refused to carry enslaved people out to the slave ships in the port of Fortaleza, paralyzing the slave trade. Even earlier, in 1883, the town of Acarape had freed its last enslaved people in the presence of the abolitionist José do Patrocínio and was renamed 'Redenção' (Redemption). The Ceará movement, led by students, merchants and intellectuals, became famous throughout Brazil for its pioneering role.
Fortaleza, the capital, grew as a port and commercial center and is today a lively coastal metropolis of more than two and a half million people, famous for its nightlife, its humor and its forró. Ceará is a powerhouse of Brazilian comedy and popular music —from an adopted Luiz Gonzaga to the singers of repente— and its cordel literature, printed in chapbooks with woodcut illustrations, is one of the richest oral traditions in the Northeast.
The state gave Brazil figures such as the writer José de Alencar, author of 'Iracema' and father of Brazilian Indianist romanticism, whose name is borne by the most emblematic theater in Fortaleza. Popular devotion, the June festivals and the crafts of lace and embroidery complete a strong cultural identity, forged between the harshness of the sertão and the joy of the coast.
The backlands of Ceará were the land of the cangaço, the phenomenon of wandering bandits who roamed the Northeast between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1930s. Lampião's band also crossed Ceará, and the state fed the imagery of courage and violence of the semi-arid interior that Brazilian literature and cinema would recreate again and again, in a world marked by drought, the struggle for land and forced migration.
The harshness of sertanejo life also nourished an intense religiosity. In Juazeiro do Norte, in the south of the state, the figure of Padre Cícero Romão Batista —a priest credited with a eucharistic miracle in 1889— turned the city into the largest center of popular pilgrimage in the Northeast, drawing millions of pilgrims every year. Devotion to 'Padim Ciço', the pífano bands and the art of the santeiros and woodcut engravers make the interior of Ceará a cultural universe of its own, as important as that of the coast.
Today Ceará is one of Brazil's great beach destinations, blessed with almost permanent sunshine and with steady winds that have made it a world mecca for kitesurfing and windsurfing. West of Fortaleza, Jericoacoara —a former fishing village now raised to international legend, with its sunset dune and its Pedra Furada— and Cumbuco draw surfers and kitesurfers from all over the planet.
To the east, Canoa Quebrada seduces with its red cliffs crowned by its famous moon-and-star emblem. Along the whole coast follow one after another dunes, freshwater lagoons, coconut palms and almost deserted beaches, a shoreline that has made Ceará a tourist magnet all year round and a key part of the 'Rota das Emoções' that links its beaches to the Lençóis Maranhenses.
The idea of moving Brazil's capital to the geographic center of the country was a very old one. As early as the nineteenth century the statesman José Bonifácio had proposed an inland capital, and the republican Constitution of 1891 went as far as expressly providing for a territory to be set aside on the central plateau for the future seat of the federal government. The purpose was twofold: to integrate the vast, thinly populated Brazilian interior and to relieve the coast, where almost the entire population was concentrated.
For decades, the project stayed on paper. Survey missions were carried out —such as the famous Cruls Mission, which at the end of the nineteenth century marked out the 'Cruls Quadrilateral' on the Planalto Central—, but the political will and the resources for such an undertaking were lacking. The dream of the 'march to the west' would have to wait until the middle of the twentieth century.
President Juscelino Kubitschek turned the dream into a building site under his slogan of making the country grow 'fifty years in five'. Between 1956 and 1960, Brasília rose from nothing in the middle of the Cerrado, in a place where there was practically nothing. The city plan, shaped like an airplane or a cross —the 'Plano Piloto'—, was the work of the urban planner Lúcio Costa, winner of the 1957 competition, while the monumental architecture was in the hands of Oscar Niemeyer.
From Niemeyer came the National Congress with its two domes, the stained-glass Cathedral, the Palácio do Planalto, the Itamaraty Palace and the Palácio da Alvorada, masterpieces of curving lines that became icons of modernism worldwide. The city was inaugurated on April 21, 1960, and that same day the Distrito Federal was created to hold it, carved out of the state of Goiás.
Brasília was not built by the architects alone, but by some 60,000 workers who came from all over the country —above all from the Northeast— and worked at a frantic pace, day and night, to meet the impossible deadline set by Kubitschek. They were known as 'candangos', and their epic of effort, sacrifice and uprooting is a fundamental part of the city's memory.
Many of those workers did not fit in the Plano Piloto, designed for civil servants, and settled in the 'cidades-satélites' that grew up around it. Much of the population of the Distrito Federal comes from that origin, mixing accents and cultures from across the nation. The candangos left behind the proof that the capital was, above all, a collective construction by the whole of Brazil.
Brasília is the seat of the three branches of the Republic —executive, legislative and judicial— and the great symbol of modern Brazil. The celebrated Square of the Three Powers brings together Congress, the Palácio do Planalto and the Supreme Federal Court, in an ensemble that sums up the ambition of a country that wanted to look to the future.
Its urban and architectural ensemble was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1987, with the distinction of being the first cultural property of the twentieth century to enter that list —alongside the pyramids of Egypt or the Acropolis of Athens—, when the city was barely 27 years old. It is considered the most complete and ambitious example of modernist urban planning ever carried out.
The Distrito Federal is today one of the units with the highest income per capita in Brazil, sustained in good part by the federal public administration. Around the Plano Piloto spread the administrative regions and satellite cities where most of its inhabitants live, a social contrast that is part of the reality of the capital.
For the traveler, Brasília is an open-air museum of modern architecture: walking the Monumental Axis, admiring the Cathedral, the National Museum or the JK Bridge, and understanding how an entire country staked itself on founding its capital in the green desert of the Cerrado. Surrounded by Brasília National Park and the Cerrado biome, the city is also a gateway to the nature of the Planalto Central.
Espírito Santo was one of the hereditary captaincies with which Portugal organized the colonization of Brazil. Its donatary, Vasco Fernandes Coutinho, landed on May 23, 1535 in the area of Prainha, in present-day Vila Velha; as it was Pentecost Sunday, he christened the land with the name Espírito Santo. Coutinho divided the land into sesmarias among the sixty or so settlers who came with him and set up the first sugar mills, the basis of the capixaba economy for almost three centuries.
The state's inhabitants are called 'capixabas', a word of Tupi origin that named the cassava fields of the region's Indigenous people. Those first years were hard: Indigenous attacks, scarce resources and isolation made the captaincy one of the most fragile in the colony.
The fate of Espírito Santo was shaped by its proximity to Minas Gerais. When gold was discovered in the interior at the beginning of the eighteenth century —part of which originally belonged to capixaba territory, later split off towards Minas—, the Portuguese crown decided to keep Espírito Santo deliberately underdeveloped, as a 'green barrier' of impenetrable Atlantic forest that would block the smuggling of Minas gold to the coast.
This policy of isolation held back the state's growth for decades: roads into the interior were forbidden and the population was concentrated in Vitória. So, while Minas filled with baroque towns, Espírito Santo was left with the role of guardian of the mines, a strategic role that explains its poverty and its 'hidden' history through much of the colonial period.
In the nineteenth century, coffee transformed Espírito Santo, and to work its plantations the Empire encouraged European immigration. From 1858, and above all from 1875 onwards, thousands of Italians arrived and settled in the highlands —Santa Teresa is considered the pioneer of Italian immigration in Brazil— and developed a thriving mountain coffee industry that is still a mark of the state's identity.
Alongside the Italians came the Pomeranians, Lutheran peasants from Baltic Pomerania who landed in Vitória in 1859 and colonized the mountains of Santa Maria de Jetibá, Domingos Martins and Pancas. Curiously, while the Pomeranian language all but vanished in its European homeland, in the capixaba highlands it is still spoken today, which makes Espírito Santo one of the last strongholds of that language in the world. That double Italian-German heritage gave the highlands a European look, with agritourism, wine and architecture from another continent.
In the twentieth century, Espírito Santo made an economic leap driven by the port of Vitória, turned into one of Brazil's great iron ore export terminals: through it the iron and steel of Minas Gerais and of Vale itself go out to the world, by way of the Vitória-Minas railway. Tubarão, in Vitória, is one of the largest ore ports on the planet.
To mining and steel were added, by the end of the century, the oil and gas of the state's offshore basin, which made Espírito Santo an important energy producer. Vitória, the capital, is one of the few island capitals in Brazil, set on an island in a bay, and together with Vila Velha and Serra it forms a dynamic metropolitan region with a high standard of living.
Espírito Santo combines, in a small territory, an Atlantic coastline and cool, green highlands. On the coast, resorts such as Guarapari are famous for their dark monazite sands, with supposedly therapeutic properties, and for their warm-water beaches. Off the southern coast of the state, in the region of the Abrolhos Archipelago —shared with Bahia—, humpback whales breed every year and draw watchers from all over the world between July and November.
Inland, Pedra Azul, the region of Domingos Martins and the wine and coffee route offer mountain tourism with a European accent. And on the table reigns the moqueca capixaba, cooked in a clay pot with urucum, without dendê or coconut milk —unlike the Bahian one—, one of the great emblems of Brazilian cooking and the source of an endless culinary rivalry with neighboring Bahia.
The territory of Goiás, inhabited by peoples such as the goyases —who gave the state its name—, the Kayapó, the Xavante and the Avá-Canoeiro, was penetrated at the beginning of the eighteenth century by the bandeirantes from São Paulo, who were looking for gold and for Indigenous people to enslave. The founding figure was Bartolomeu Bueno da Silva, the 'Anhanguera', who pushed up through these territories in search of riches.
The discovery of gold on the banks of the Vermelho River gave rise to the arraial of Sant'Ana, founded around 1727, which soon became Vila Boa de Goiás and, in 1749, capital of the captaincy. For half a century gold drew thousands of people and built up a mining society; but once the veins ran out towards the end of the century, Goiás fell into a swift, deep decline that plunged it into a long isolation.
The old Vila Boa —today Cidade de Goiás or 'Goiás Velho'— was the state capital until well into the twentieth century and preserves one of the most harmonious colonial ensembles in Brazil: cobbled lanes, whitewashed houses, eighteenth-century baroque churches and the memory of an age of mining splendor. For that historical and urban value, it was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 2001.
Goiás Velho is also the city of the poet Cora Coralina, who immortalized it in her verse, and is famous for its Procession of the Fire (Procissão do Fogaréu) in Holy Week, a tradition of colonial origin that lights its streets with torches. It is the historical and sentimental heart of the state.
With the gold exhausted, Goiás turned into a cattle and farming economy of enormous distances and scant population. The modernizing push came in the twentieth century: in 1933 it was decided to move the capital to a new, planned city, and by a decree of 1937 Goiânia was consolidated, designed by the town planner Attílio Corrêa Lima in the heart of the state, with a radial layout and an art deco air.
A few decades later, the creation of Brasília on the neighboring plateau —on land split off from Goiás to form the Federal District— turned the region into the country's new geographic and political center. Goiás thus went from forgotten corner to the heart of the 'march to the west' and of the new inland Brazil.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, bringing the Cerrado into mechanized agriculture completely transformed the economy of Goiás. With technology to correct acid soils and with adapted crop varieties, the Brazilian savanna became one of the largest agricultural frontiers in the world, and Goiás emerged as a powerhouse producer of soybeans, corn, sugarcane and cattle.
Today the state combines that agro-industrial modernity with the conservation of an extraordinary biome. The Goiás Cerrado, the most biodiverse savanna on the planet, is a mosaic of twisted shrubs, grasslands and gallery forest along the rivers, and its preservation has become a central issue in the Brazilian environmental debate, given that it supplies water to a good part of the country.
The great natural heritage of Goiás is the Chapada dos Veadeiros, a plateau of rocks more than a billion years old, with canyons, waterfalls and quartz crystals, declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 2001 and famous for its almost mystical energy and its starry sky. Alongside it is Caldas Novas, the largest hydrothermal resort in the world, whose thermal waters rise from underground and feed water parks visited by millions of people.
The state also holds gems such as Pirenópolis, with its colonial old town and its traditional Cavalhadas —an equestrian reenactment of the fighting between Moors and Christians—, and Corumbá de Goiás. Its culture, part sertaneja and part Cerrado, gave Brazil much of the 'sertaneja' music that dominates the country's radio. Colonial history, unique nature and rural tradition make Goiás one of the richest states of central Brazil.
Maranhão has a singular origin in the history of Brazil: its capital, São Luís, was founded by the French on September 8, 1612, as part of an ambitious tropical colony project called 'Equinoctial France'. The expedition, with some 500 settlers who had sailed from Brittany, was led by Daniel de la Touche, lord of La Ravardière, and by admiral François de Rasilly, and named the city in honor of King Louis XIII of France.
The French venture did not last long: in 1615, Portuguese troops arriving from Pernambuco defeated the French and expelled the colony, bringing Maranhão definitively under Portuguese rule. But the city kept its French name, and São Luís remained forever the only state capital in Brazil founded by the French, a fact its people take pride in.
Under Portuguese rule, Maranhão prospered on sugar and, above all, on cotton and rice, produced with an enormous mass of enslaved African labor. In the eighteenth century, the General Trading Company of Grão-Pará and Maranhão gave a boost to the slave trade and to exports, and São Luís lived through an age of wealth that filled the city with mansions and small palaces.
Those mansions were faced with Portuguese tiles —São Luís holds the largest collection of Portuguese azulejo work in Latin America—, and its historic center, one of the most extensive colonial ensembles in Brazil, was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1997. Maranhão joined Brazil's independence late, in 1823, after the resistance of the Portuguese garrison, which only surrendered under pressure from the imperial squadron commanded by Lord Cochrane.
Maranhão was the scene of one of the greatest popular rebellions of imperial Brazil: the Balaiada (1838-1841), which broke out during the turbulent period of the Regencies. It was an uprising of cowhands, artisans, runaway slaves and the poor of the sertão against the great landowners and the provincial authorities, in which thousands of people were mobilized and whole towns were taken.
Among its leaders were Manuel Francisco dos Anjos Ferreira —the 'Balaio', who gave the revolt its name through his trade of making baskets—, the cowhand Raimundo Gomes and the Black leader Cosme Bento, at the head of thousands of rebel slaves. The repression, led by colonel Luís Alves de Lima e Silva —the future Duke of Caxias, patron of the Brazilian Army—, was relentless and crushed the movement by around 1841, in one of the bloodiest episodes in the history of Maranhão.
The strong African heritage of Maranhão is expressed in cultural forms of enormous richness. The tambor de crioula, a circular dance to the beat of drums born among enslaved and Afro-descendant communities, was recognized by IPHAN as Cultural Heritage of Brazil, and remains one of the state's most vivid religious and festive expressions.
But the festival that defines Maranhão is the bumba-meu-boi, which every June floods São Luís with music, dance and color through the theatrical, danced staging of the death and resurrection of an ox. Its different 'sotaques' (styles) —zabumba, matraca, orchestra— bring together thousands of brincantes in embroidered costumes and beautiful allegorical figures, in one of the most spectacular popular events in Brazil. To these are added reggae —São Luís is known as the 'Brazilian Jamaica' for its devotion to the genre— and a literature that gave the country Gonçalves Dias and Aluísio Azevedo.
The state's greatest natural attraction is the Lençóis Maranhenses: a vast field of white dunes —the largest in South America— that, in the rainy season, between the months of May and September, fills with thousands of lagoons of crystal-clear turquoise water. The phenomenon happens because the water table surfaces between the dunes and forms temporary lakes of almost unreal beauty, in one of the most surreal landscapes in Brazil. The National Park that protects them has been recognized as a Natural World Heritage Site.
The Lençóis are the base of the 'Rota das Emoções', the tourist circuit that links the park with the Parnaíba Delta and with Jericoacoara, crossing three states. And that is because Maranhão marks precisely the transition between the semi-arid Northeastern sertão and the humid Amazon rainforest: a hinge state, half Northeast and half Amazonia, with mangroves, coconut palms and one of the largest coastlines in the country.
Mato Grosso —'dense forest' in Portuguese— was and still is home to numerous Indigenous peoples. Many of them inhabit the state to this day: the Xavante of the Serra do Roncador, the Bororo (Boe), the Nambikwara, the Rikbaktsa and the sixteen peoples of the Upper Xingu, among others. These cultures developed complex societies adapted to the savanna and to the forest, with rich ceremonial and funerary traditions and a tradition of painted bodies.
At the heart of the state lies the Xingu Indigenous Park, the first Indigenous land officially recognized by Brazil's federal government, with more than 27,000 km², where some 5,500 Indigenous people from sixteen different peoples live together. Its creation in 1961, driven by the Villas-Bôas brothers, became a pioneering model of territorial and cultural protection that influenced the whole of Brazilian Indigenous policy.
The discovery of gold led the bandeirantes of São Paulo deep into the interior of the continent. In 1718 the bandeirante Pascoal Moreira Cabral, of mestizo origin, went up the Coxipó River and found abundant gold deposits; on 8 April 1719 the founding document of Cuiabá was drawn up, and Pascoal was acclaimed as head of the newborn mining town.
That gold had an enormous geopolitical consequence: it pushed Brazil's frontier far beyond the line of the Treaty of Tordesillas, consolidating Portuguese possession of lands deep in the continent, far from the coast. Cuiabá became a remote outpost of the empire, linked to São Paulo by the dangerous 'monções', immensely long river expeditions that took months to cross rivers, cachoeiras and Indigenous territories.
Because of its strategic position on the border with the Spanish possessions, Mato Grosso was key in defining Brazil's boundaries with Bolivia and Paraguay. During the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) the state suffered the invasion of Solano López's Paraguayan troops, which occupied part of its territory in the so-called 'Retreat from Laguna', an episode immortalized by Alfredo d'Escragnolle Taunay.
The gigantic size of the state ended up leading to its division. In 1977, by Complementary Law No. 31 signed by President Ernesto Geisel, the southern half of Mato Grosso split off to form a new state, Mato Grosso do Sul, with its capital at Campo Grande. Cuiabá remained the capital of Mato Grosso, which even so kept enormous dimensions.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, the occupation of the Mato Grosso Cerrado by mechanized agriculture turned the state into one of the largest agricultural frontiers in the world. With immense plantations of soy, maize and cotton, and enormous cattle herds, Mato Grosso became Brazil's largest soy producer and one of the leading exporters of farm commodities on the planet.
That agro-industrial growth, however, coexists with strong environmental tensions: the expansion of the farming frontier presses on the Amazon and the Cerrado and on Indigenous lands, and places the state at the center of the world debate on deforestation. Mato Grosso thus embodies the double face of contemporary Brazil: a productive powerhouse and a critical front of the environmental crisis.
Mato Grosso is a unique mosaic of biomes. To the north stretches the Amazon; in the center, the Cerrado, with the spectacular Chapada dos Guimarães, a highland of reddish tablelands, waterfalls and lookouts such as the Morro dos Ventos, from which the immense plain of the Pantanal can be seen. And to the south unfolds the Northern Pantanal, the largest wetland in the world.
The way into the Pantanal along the Estrada Transpantaneira, which starts at Poconé, is one of the best places on the planet to see jaguars in the wild, along with caimans, capybaras, tuiuiús and an extraordinary fauna. To this is added Nobres, with its crystal-clear rivers, ideal for floating among the fish. Colonial history, Indigenous culture and overwhelming nature make Mato Grosso one of the most astonishing destinations in Brazil's interior.
The south of the old Mato Grosso was, for centuries, the territory of many Indigenous peoples, a good number of whom are still there today. Mato Grosso do Sul has the third largest Indigenous population in Brazil, with more than a hundred thousand people from ethnic groups such as the Guaraní-Kaiowá, the Terena, the Kadiwéu —heirs of the fearsome Guaycuru, 'the horseback Indians' of the Chaco—, the Kinikinaw, the Ofaié and the Guató, a canoe people of the Pantanal.
The Kadiwéu are famous for their graphic art and their pottery, which fascinated the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss when he visited them in the 1930s and described them in 'Tristes Tropiques'. That strong Indigenous presence gives the state the identity of a cultural frontier, in close contact with Paraguay and Bolivia.
The non-Indigenous occupation of southern Mato Grosso was organized around extensive cattle raising on the great estancias and around the exploitation of yerba mate, in close contact with Paraguay. The region was one of the hardest hit by the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870): the troops of Solano López invaded the south of Mato Grosso at the start of the conflict, laying waste to towns and ranches, in one of the episodes that shaped the historical memory of the area.
After the war, the frontier was slowly resettled. Campo Grande, the future capital, was born in 1899 as a crossroads on the cattle route and grew with the arrival of the Noroeste do Brasil railway at the beginning of the twentieth century, which connected it with São Paulo and with the Bolivian border and gave it commercial and strategic momentum.
The enormous size of Mato Grosso and the differences between its northern and southern halves fed a 'divisionist' movement for decades. The separation became fact on October 11, 1977, when president Ernesto Geisel signed Complementary Law No. 31, which created the state of Mato Grosso do Sul with its capital at Campo Grande. The new state, made up of 55 municipalities, began operating fully on January 1, 1979.
The decision sought to administer an immense territory better and to strengthen farming development in the south. With a strong frontier stamp, the state combines Brazilian and Paraguayan influences with those of Japanese, Syrian-Lebanese and Paraguayan immigrants, in a cultural mix reflected in its music, its accent and its cooking —from tereré, the iced mate inherited from the Guaraní, to sopa paraguaya.
Mato Grosso do Sul holds most of the Pantanal, the largest wetland in the world, which in the rainy season floods to form an immense mosaic of lagoons, rivers and grasslands. It is one of the greatest biodiversity sanctuaries on the planet: capybaras, caimans, marsh deer, blue macaws, tuiuiús —the region's symbol bird— and one of the largest concentrations of jaguars in the world.
Access from the south, through Miranda, Aquidauana and the 'Estrada Parque', makes it possible to travel a landscape where wildlife can be watched with exceptional ease. The traditional cattle raising of the pantaneiro —on horseback, among the waters— lives alongside an expanding ecotourism and the challenge of protecting this fragile biome from fires and agricultural pressure.
The state's other great jewel is Bonito, in the Serra da Bodoquena, the epicenter of Brazilian ecotourism. There, rivers fed by limestone springs reach an astonishing transparency that lets you 'float' downstream among shoals of fish, as in the Rio da Prata or the Rio Sucuri, in an experience comparable to diving in fresh water.
Bonito also holds unique underground landscapes: the Gruta do Lago Azul, with its intensely blue inner lake, and the Abismo Anhumas, a cave you descend into by rappel to dive in its crystalline lake. This model of orderly, sustainable tourism turned Mato Grosso do Sul into one of Brazil's great nature destinations, adding to the wildlife of the Pantanal the magic of the waters of Bonito.
At the end of the seventeenth century, the bandeirantes of São Paulo found gold in the 'general mines' of the interior, setting off the greatest gold rush in the history of the Americas. Within a few decades an avalanche of prospectors arriving from all over the empire and of enslaved Africans peopled the valleys and mountains, and rich, refined towns sprang up: Vila Rica (founded around 1698 and capital from 1720), Mariana, São João del-Rei, Tiradentes, Sabará and Diamantina.
Those mining towns flourished with an extraordinary baroque art, the 'barroco mineiro', whose peak was the sculptor and architect Antônio Francisco Lisboa, the 'Aleijadinho', creator of churches, altarpieces and of the celebrated soapstone prophets of Congonhas. Vila Rica, renamed Ouro Preto, was the capital of Minas until 1897 and in 1980 became the first Brazilian town declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
The weight of the crown's taxes on gold —especially the 'derrama', the forced collection of arrears— provoked in 1789 the Inconfidência Mineira, the first great conspiracy for the independence of Brazil, inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment and by the recent independence of the United States. It brought together poets, priests, soldiers and landowners of the mining elite, many of them in debt and unhappy with Lisbon.
The plot was denounced and crushed before it could break out. Of all those involved, only one was sentenced to death: Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, the ensign nicknamed 'Tiradentes' (tooth-puller), who took responsibility and was hanged and quartered in Rio de Janeiro on 21 April 1792. In time he became the great martyr and hero of Brazilian independence, civic patron of the nation, and his name is borne by one of the historic towns of Minas.
With the gold exhausted by the end of the eighteenth century, Minas reinvented itself with dairy farming, cheese and coffee, which made it one of the most populous and prosperous provinces of the Empire. During the First Republic, its political alliance with São Paulo —the 'coffee with milk', the coffee of São Paulo and the milk of Minas— dominated national life and had the two states take turns in the presidency.
In the twentieth century, Minas also became the steel-making heart of Brazil thanks to the iron of the Quadrilátero Ferrífero, a region of some 7,000 km² around Ouro Preto, Mariana and Itabira that produces most of the country's iron ore and that, through the company Vale, supplies the national steelworks and the export market. That same iron was the origin of environmental tragedies such as the collapse of the tailings dams of Mariana (2015) and Brumadinho (2019).
In 1897, Minas moved its capital from old Ouro Preto to a new, planned city: Belo Horizonte, one of the first designed cities in Brazil, with a grid layout and wide avenues, conceived as a symbol of republican progress. Its growth turned it into the country's third metropolis.
In the 1940s, the young mayor Juscelino Kubitschek commissioned Oscar Niemeyer to design the architectural ensemble of Pampulha —with its celebrated church of São Francisco de Assis and its undulating lines—, a trial run of modern architecture that anticipated what the two would later do in Brasília. Belo Horizonte thus established itself as a cradle of Brazilian modernity and as a vibrant capital of bars (the 'botecos'), music and nightlife.
Minas Gerais is today a destination of history, nature and culture. Its baroque towns —Ouro Preto, Tiradentes, Mariana, São João del-Rei, Diamantina, also a World Heritage Site— form the largest colonial ensemble in Brazil. Near Belo Horizonte, in Brumadinho, lies Inhotim, the largest open-air contemporary art museum-garden in the world, which combines galleries of international artists with an extraordinary botanical garden.
The nature of Minas offers the Serra do Cipó, the canyons and turquoise waters of Capitólio in the 'Sea of Minas', and the Serra da Canastra, where the São Francisco River rises. And above all there is the cooking of Minas, perhaps the best loved in Brazil: pão de queijo, feijão tropeiro, chicken with okra, artisanal cachaça and mountain cheeses. A land of mountains, mines, saints and tradition, Minas is one of the great cradles of Brazilian identity.
The territory of Paraná was inhabited by Tupí-Guaraní peoples —the carijós of the coast— and by the Kaingang and Xokleng of the interior, as well as the now almost vanished Xetá. In the seventeenth century, Spanish Jesuits founded in the Guairá region, to the west, a constellation of Guaraní missions that came to gather tens of thousands of evangelized Indigenous people.
That flowering was wiped out by the bandeiras of slave hunters from São Paulo, above all those led by Antônio Raposo Tavares, who between 1628 and 1632 destroyed the Guairá missions and dragged thousands of Guaraní toward São Paulo. The surviving Jesuits and Indigenous people fell back southward, to what is now Rio Grande do Sul. Guairá was left depopulated and under de facto Portuguese control.
Effective Portuguese occupation began along the coast, driven by the search for gold. In the seventeenth century, miners and adventurers reached Paranaguá and climbed the Serra do Mar up to the high plateau, where Curitiba was born. The tales of 'enormous mines' proved exaggerated —the expert Rodrigo de Castel Blanco warned the king as much in 1680— but the cycle left behind the state's first settled centers.
The great engine of the eighteenth century was tropeirismo. The opening of the Viamão–Sorocaba road in 1731 turned Paraná into an obligatory stop on the mule and cattle trade coming up from the south toward the fairs of São Paulo. Along that route towns such as Lapa, Ponta Grossa and Castro sprang up, and the harvesting of erva-mate and of araucaria timber —the pine that is the state's emblem— took hold.
For centuries the region depended administratively on São Paulo as its 5th Comarca. The separatist push grew on the back of the prosperous erva-mate economy —exported to Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile— and of political tensions with the parent province, among them the punishment of São Paulo for its role in liberal revolts.
Imperial Law no. 704, enacted on August 28, 1853, created the province of Paraná, which was officially split off from São Paulo on December 19 of that year, with Curitiba as its capital. The new state's name —from the Tupí 'para-na', 'a river as big as the sea'— referred to the great river that washes its western border.
From the late nineteenth century, Paraná took in intense European settlement: Poles, Ukrainians, Italians, Germans, Swiss and even a Dutch colony (Castrolanda, near Castro) populated the plateau and developed farming and industry. Japanese immigrants would arrive later as well. That mix gave the state a cultural character all its own in southern Brazil.
In the north, the fertile 'tierras roxas' drew coffee growers from São Paulo and Minas Gerais, and cities such as Londrina and Maringá grew at dizzying speed as coffee frontiers between 1950 and 1970, until the 'geada negra' —the great frost of July 18, 1975— devastated the plantations and sped up the rural exodus. Earlier, between 1912 and 1916, the interior bordering Santa Catarina had been the stage of the Guerra do Contestado, a bloody rebellion of poor peasants, led by messianic monks, against the state and a railway company.
In the twentieth century, Curitiba became a world benchmark in urban planning. From the 1970s on, under the management of the architect and engineer Jaime Lerner, the city rolled out a pioneering system of express buses on dedicated corridors —the forerunner of the BRT now copied the world over—, a network of parks and green spaces, and recycling and transport policies that made it a byword for the sustainable city in Latin America.
That modernizing stamp coexisted with the state's industrial weight, boosted by projects such as the Presidente Getúlio Vargas refinery (1977) and the soy agro-industry, which succeeded coffee as the great product of Paraná.
Paraná holds two wonders of water. The Iguazú Falls, shared with Argentina and declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1986, spread almost three hundred cascades across the Parque Nacional do Iguaçu, one of the largest surviving stretches of Atlantic Forest in the south. And the Itaipú dam, on the Paraná river along the border with Paraguay, was for decades the world's largest hydroelectric plant by output.
To these add the historic train that descends the Serra do Mar from Curitiba to colonial Morretes, the Ilha do Mel with its beaches and its lighthouse, and the curious sandstone formations of the Parque Estadual de Vila Velha, sculpted by millions of years of erosion. From the western land of great waters to the Atlantic coast, Paraná offers one of the most striking sets of natural landscapes in Brazil.
Before the Europeans arrived, the coast of today's Paraíba was inhabited by the Potiguara —whose name means 'shrimp eaters' in Tupi—, who controlled the banks of the Paraíba River, and by the Tabajara, along with peoples of the interior such as the Cariri and the Ariú. The Potiguara wove a strategic alliance with the French merchants who traded brazilwood along the coast, which made them fearsome enemies of the Portuguese crown for almost the whole of the sixteenth century.
The conquest of Paraíba was one of the longest and hardest in all of Brazil: the Portuguese failed time and again in the face of Indigenous resistance. The decisive trigger was the attack on the engenho of Tracunhaém, which led to the creation of the Royal Captaincy of Paraíba in 1574. Only on 5 August 1585 —the day of Our Lady of the Snows— did an expedition commanded by Martim Leitão manage to found for good the town of Nossa Senhora das Neves, the future João Pessoa, relying paradoxically on the Tabajara, who were fighting against the Potiguara. Shortly afterwards, João Tavares raised the Forte São Filipe at the mouth of the river, in honor of King Philip II of Spain, at that time also sovereign of Portugal.
Like the whole Northeast, Paraíba organized its colonial economy around sugar cane. The zona da mata and the coast filled with engenhos worked by enslaved Africans, and the city —renamed Filipéia de Nossa Senhora das Neves in 1588— became one of the sugar centers of the Portuguese empire.
From 1670 onwards, extensive cattle ranching pushed settlement towards the semi-arid interior, the sertão, giving rise to a society of cowhands and ranches and to a culture bound to livestock and to withstanding the droughts. That geographical duality —the green, humid sugar coast, the temperate brejo of the highlands and the arid sertão— still shapes the identity of Paraíba today.
During the Dutch expansion across the sugar-growing Northeast, Paraíba also fell under the rule of the West India Company. The Dutch reached the region in 1625 and, after several attempts, took the capital, which was renamed Frederikstad —in honor of Prince Frederick Henry of Orange—.
The occupation lasted until 1654, when the Portuguese, with the decisive support of local leaders, recovered the territory as part of the general process of expelling the Dutch from Brazil. The resistance of Paraíba was engraved in the memory of the state as one of the founding episodes of its identity.
In the nineteenth century the province joined the independence of Brazil and lived through the political tensions of the Empire and the First Republic. The episode that would mark its history forever took place in 1930: João Pessoa Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, governor of the state and candidate for vice-president on the ticket of the Liberal Alliance alongside Getúlio Vargas, was murdered on 26 July 1930 in a confectionery shop in Recife.
His death was one of the immediate triggers of the Revolution of 1930 that brought Vargas to power and put an end to the old oligarchic republic. That same year the capital —until then called Parahyba— was renamed João Pessoa in his honor. The motto on the state's coat of arms, 'Nego' ('I refuse'), alludes to the firmness with which João Pessoa refused to fall in with the dominant politics, and it remains a symbol of the character of Paraíba.
Paraíba is one of the great cradles of the popular culture of the Northeast. Cordel literature —those booklets of narrative poetry hung from strings at the markets—, forró, the festa junina and the tradition of repente and viola are part of the soul of the state. The city of Campina Grande, in the agreste, disputes with Caruaru the title of the 'biggest São João in the world', a mass June festival.
Paraíba also gave Brazil intellectual figures of the first order: the poet Augusto dos Anjos, author of a body of work as singular as it is sombre; Epitácio Pessoa, president of the Republic between 1919 and 1922; and the writer José Américo de Almeida, author of 'A Bagaceira', considered a pioneer of the regionalist novel of the Northeast. Contemporary cinema and much of the roots music of the Northeast draw on this cultural matrix.
The great geographical emblem of Paraíba is Ponta do Seixas, in João Pessoa: the easternmost point of the continental Americas, the place where dawn breaks before anywhere else on the continent. The Farol do Cabo Branco, an art deco work raised on the cliffs, marks that symbolic extreme and has become the state's postcard image.
João Pessoa also claims to be one of the greenest cities in the world, with the Parque Arruda Câmara and the Mata do Buraquinho, a fragment of Atlantic Forest in the middle of the urban fabric. Its coastline of calm beaches and reefs —Tambaú, Cabo Branco, Coqueirinho to the south— and the fresh brejo of the highlands complete an offer that combines nature, colonial history and an intense popular cultural life.
Pará was the gateway of the Portuguese conquest of the Amazon. On 12 January 1616, Francisco Caldeira Castelo Branco founded, near the mouth of the great river, the fort that gave rise to Belém —initially called 'Feliz Lusitânia'—, with the mission of defending the region against the French, Dutch and English who prowled the coast. From there, Portuguese settlers and missionaries went up the Amazon, subdued or enslaved the Indigenous peoples and consolidated Portuguese rule over the whole basin.
During the colonial period, Belém and the whole Amazon formed the Estado do Grão-Pará e Maranhão, an administrative unit separate from the rest of Brazil and linked directly to Lisbon, oriented towards the North Atlantic rather than towards southern Brazil. The city became the great metropolis of the north and the center from which the Amazon was governed for centuries.
Pará was the stage of one of the most radical and bloody rebellions in the whole history of Brazil: the Cabanagem (1835-1840). It was a revolt of Indigenous people, enslaved Blacks and poor mestizos —the 'cabanos', named after the humble riverside huts they lived in— against the white elites and the distant imperial authority. At the height of the movement, the rebels went so far as to take Belém and to govern the province, an exceptional event in Latin American history.
Imperial repression was brutal: it is reckoned that the war cost the lives of some 30,000 to 40,000 people, perhaps a fifth of the province's population. The Cabanagem is remembered as the only rebellion of imperial Brazil in which the poorest layers of the population effectively won power, if only for a short time, and it remains a symbol of Amazonian popular struggle.
At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the rubber fever —the latex of Hevea brasiliensis, indispensable to the tyre industry— turned Belém, along with Manaus, into an opulent city. Rubber money financed a dazzling modernization: up went the Teatro da Paz (1878), the Lauro Sodré Palace and the Antônio Lemos Palace, and the Ver-o-Peso market was remodelled (in its present form, from 1901), on the banks of the Guamá River, today considered the largest open-air market in Latin America.
Belém took on the mango trees that shade its avenues to this day, a French-styled urbanism and an intense cultural life, in the middle of the rainforest. When Asian rubber sank the market around 1912, the city kept that architectural legacy as evidence of its golden age. Belém is today a metropolis of more than a million inhabitants and the great cultural capital of northern Brazil.
Pará offers some of the most astonishing landscapes in the Amazon. The island of Marajó, at the mouth of the Amazon, is the largest fluvial-marine island in the world: a land of flood plains, herds of buffalo —brought, so the legend goes, from a shipwreck—, riverside communities and the memory of the sophisticated Marajoara culture, whose thousand-year-old pottery is among the most remarkable in pre-Columbian America.
Near Santarém, at the point where the green waters of the Tapajós River meet the Amazon, lies Alter do Chão, with its white sand beaches that emerge in the dry season and that earned it the nickname of the 'Amazonian Caribbean'. To this is added an immense forest crossed by gigantic rivers, with national parks and an extraordinary biodiversity, in a state that combines the world of the rivers with that of the Atlantic.
The culture of Pará is one of the richest and most singular in Brazil. Its great expression is the Círio de Nazaré, the largest Catholic procession in the country: every October, millions of the faithful accompany the image of Our Lady of Nazareth through the streets of Belém, in one of the greatest demonstrations of faith in the world, declared Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO.
In music, Pará is the cradle of carimbó —an Afro-Indigenous drum rhythm— and of the modern tecnobrega and guitarrada. And at the table, its cooking of Indigenous roots is among the most original in Brazil: tacacá with jambu (the herb that 'numbs' the mouth), pato no tucupi, açaí eaten savory with fish and farinha, and maniçoba. Belém, host of major international environmental summits, has also become a worldwide showcase for the debate on the future of the Amazon.
Pernambuco was the hereditary captaincy granted in 1534 to Duarte Coelho, who arrived the following year and, after defeating in 1537 the Caeté allied with the French, founded Olinda on an old Indigenous village. With its fertile massapê soil, the region became the most prosperous in colonial Brazil thanks to sugarcane: the coast filled with engenhos worked by thousands of enslaved Africans, and Olinda grew into one of the wealthiest cities in all of the Americas.
The abundance of this 'white gold' —and of the port of Recife, which channeled its trade— made Pernambuco a prize coveted by the European powers and the setting for social tensions that would explode centuries later, such as the Guerra dos Mascates of 1710, which pitted the merchants of Recife against the old rural aristocracy of Olinda.
Between 1630 and 1654, the Dutch West India Company occupied Pernambuco, drawn precisely by its sugar wealth. Its period of splendor came under the government of Count John Maurice of Nassau (1637-1644), who turned Recife —and neighboring Mauritsstad, on the island of Antônio Vaz— into a modern city, with bridges, palaces, an observatory and a botanical garden.
Nassau proclaimed a remarkable freedom of worship and of trade, which attracted Sephardic Jews —who built in Recife the Kahal Zur Israel, the first synagogue in the Americas— and artists such as the painters Frans Post and Albert Eckhout, who portrayed for the first time the landscapes and the people of the Brazilian tropics. Nassau's departure precipitated the Portuguese counterattack.
The expulsion of the Dutch was sealed in the two battles of the Guararapes hills, in 1648 and 1649, near Recife. Fighting there was an alliance of Portuguese, Indigenous people —under the leadership of the Potiguar chief Felipe Camarão— and free Black men —commanded by Henrique Dias—, in a feat that Brazilian military tradition regards as the founding milestone of the Army and of a budding sense of national identity. The Dutch capitulated for good in 1654.
Inland, in the Serra da Barriga (today in Alagoas, but arising under the captaincy of Pernambuco), the Quilombo dos Palmares stood for almost the whole seventeenth century, the largest community of runaway slaves in the history of the Americas. Its resistance, embodied in the leader Zumbi, was crushed only in 1694-1695 by bandeirante troops brought from the south. Zumbi is today a hero of Brazilian Black consciousness.
Pernambuco was the most persistent hotbed of political rebellion in monarchic Brazil. The Pernambucan Revolution of 1817, brought on by the sugar and cotton crisis, discontent with the Portuguese trade monopoly and Enlightenment ideas, proclaimed a republic on Brazilian soil for the first time and even installed a provisional government, before being defeated by the crown's troops.
In 1824 the Confederation of the Equator broke out, seeking to join Pernambuco, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte and Paraíba in a republic separate from the Empire of Pedro I. Its towering figure was the friar Joaquim do Amor Divino Rabelo, 'Frei Caneca', who had already taken part in the revolution of 1817; captured, he was shot by firing squad that same year. Still to come was the Revolução Praieira of 1848, the last great provincial rebellion of the Empire. That unruly tradition is part of Pernambucan pride.
Pernambuco is one of Brazil's greatest cultural powerhouses. It is the birthplace of frevo —frenetic dance and music with parasols, today Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity— and of maracatu, whose drums sink their roots in the Afro-Brazilian brotherhoods. The Carnival of Recife and Olinda, with its giant 'Galo da Madrugada' figure —considered the largest carnival bloco in the world—, is one of the most original on the planet. In the 1990s, Chico Science's manguebeat movement fused those roots with rock and electronic music.
The land also produced decisive thinkers: the abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco, one of the great voices against slavery; the sociologist Gilberto Freyre, author of 'Casa-Grande & Senzala', a fundamental work for understanding the making of Brazil; and the educator Paulo Freire, whose literacy method was born in the Pernambucan interior.
The colonial core of Olinda, perched on its hill of baroque churches and colorful old houses, was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1982. Recife, the 'Brazilian Venice' laced with rivers and bridges, preserves in its Recife Antigo the stamp of the Dutch period and an intense cultural life.
Off the coast, out in the Atlantic, the volcanic archipelago of Fernando de Noronha —some 535 km from Recife and part of the state since 1988— is a sanctuary of transparent waters, turtles, sharks and spinner dolphins, and a World Heritage Site as well. And on the southern coast, Porto de Galinhas seduces with its natural reef pools and its jangadas, one of the most famous beach destinations in all of Brazil.
Unlike almost all of Brazil, Piauí was not settled from the coast inland, but the other way round. From the second half of the seventeenth century, cowhands from the Vale do São Francisco and from Bahia pushed north in search of pasture, following the course of the Parnaíba river, which gives the state its name and its life. Extensive cattle ranching was for centuries the economic base of this semi-arid land.
The key figure of that settlement was Domingos Afonso Mafrense, nicknamed 'capitão Domingos Sertão', who came to amass some thirty cattle estates and, on his death, bequeathed them in 1711 to the Jesuits, whose work proved decisive in the growth of the livestock trade. Piauí fell under the jurisdiction of Maranhão from 1715 and became a captaincy in its own right in 1758, with Oeiras as its first capital.
Oeiras, in the sertão of the interior, was for almost a century the political and religious center of Piauí, and it preserves a remarkable colonial heritage and an intense Holy Week. But its landlocked position made trade difficult.
In 1852 the capital was moved to a new, planned city beside the Parnaíba river: Teresina, named in honor of the empress Teresa Cristina, wife of Pedro II. Teresina has the distinction of being the only capital in the Northeast that does not sit on the sea, and it grew as a trading hub between the sertão and the coast, taking advantage of river navigation on the Parnaíba.
Piauí was the scene of one of the few armed clashes of Brazil's independence. On March 13, 1823, at Campo Maior, popular militias of piauienses, cearenses and maranhenses —many with no military training at all, armed with knives and farm tools— stood up to the Portuguese troops of General João José da Cunha Fidié in the bloody batalha do Jenipapo.
Though they were beaten on the field, the resistance wore down the Portuguese forces and hastened the accession of Piauí and of the whole north to an independent Brazil. The date is commemorated today as a symbol of popular sacrifice in the nation's emancipation.
Beyond cattle, the historic economy of Piauí rested on gathering the products of the sertão: the carnaúba palm —whose leaves yield an extremely valuable wax, used by industry worldwide— and the babaçu, whose nut gave oil. It was a hard economy, marked by cyclical droughts that forged the culture of the cowhand, popular faith and endurance in the face of adversity.
That backland world left its mark on regional literature and music, and explains much of the piauiense character: austere, tenacious and deeply bound to the arid land and to the great rivers that cross it.
The great treasure of Piauí is the Serra da Capivara National Park, declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1991. Its canyons and rock shelters hold the largest body of cave paintings in all of the Americas —thousands of panels with scenes of hunting, dancing, sex and daily life— with ages of more than ten thousand years.
The excavations led by the French-Brazilian archaeologist Niède Guidon, above all at the Pedra Furada site, produced datings that she placed at around 50,000 years, which revived —controversially and still under debate— the scientific discussion about how long ago humans peopled the continent. The park today has a modern Museum of the American Man and is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world.
In the far north, the short coastline of Piauí opens into the Parnaíba delta, the only open-sea delta in the Americas: a maze of more than seventy islands, waterways, mangroves and dunes shared with neighboring Maranhão.
Crossed by boat among a wildlife of herons, monkeys and scarlet ibises, the delta is part of the 'Rota das Emoções', the tourist circuit that links Piauí, Ceará and Maranhão. Together with the Serra da Capivara, it makes Piauí a state of extreme contrasts: from the arid prehistoric sertão to the humid mangroves of the delta.
The territory of Rio Grande do Norte was inhabited by the Potiguara people and by Tapuia groups of the interior. In 1501, a Portuguese expedition that included Amerigo Vespucci reached Cabo de São Roque, the point where the Brazilian coast 'bends' to the south. In 1535 the Capitania do Rio Grande was created in name only, under the chronicler João de Barros, but effective occupation took decades, held back by the fierceness of the Potiguara, allies of the French brazilwood traders.
Only at the end of the sixteenth century did the Portuguese manage to dominate the region. The most famous Potiguara of all, Poti —baptized Antônio Filipe Camarão—, would later become a hero of the wars against the Dutch, switching sides to fight for the Portuguese crown.
To secure the conquest, the Portuguese raised a strategic fortress at the mouth of the Potengi river: begun on Epiphany 1598, it was named Fortaleza dos Reis Magos and was finished months later. Its star-shaped plan and its low, narrow doorways —designed to make assaults difficult— made it one of the most unusual fortifications in Brazil.
Under the fort's protection, on December 25, 1599, with a mass, the city of Natal was founded ('Christmas', after the date). The young town grew slowly among the cattle of the sertão, sugar cane and the first salt works of the coast.
As part of Dutch Brazil, the region was occupied by the Dutch between 1633 and 1654. Natal was renamed 'Nova Amsterdã' and the Fortaleza dos Reis Magos became the Castelo de Keulen. The occupation left a tragic mark: in 1645, during the backlash against Dutch rule, came the massacres of Cunhaú and Uruaçu, in which numerous Catholics were killed —today venerated as the 'martyrs of Natal', canonized by the Church—.
After the definitive expulsion of the Dutch in 1654, Rio Grande do Norte returned to Portuguese hands and carried on its slow development, tied to cattle raising and the products of the sertão.
The state's historical economy rested on cotton —its main product in colonial times and in the early twentieth century—, on cattle raising in the Seridó region and, above all, on sea salt. The great salt works of the northern coast, around Mossoró and Areia Branca, made Rio Grande do Norte the largest producer of sea salt in Brazil, with more than 90% of national output.
The harsh sertão was also a stage for the cangaço: in 1927 the legendary bandit Lampião (Virgulino Ferreira da Silva) tried to storm the city of Mossoró, but suffered there one of his few defeats, thanks to the organized resistance of its people, an episode that is part of local pride.
Because of its position on the corner of South America —the point closest to Africa—, Rio Grande do Norte played a strategic role in the Second World War. At Parnamirim, next to Natal, the United States set up the Parnamirim Field air base, the largest Allied airlift toward Africa and Europe, nicknamed the 'Trampolim da Vitória' ('Springboard to Victory').
Between 1942 and 1945, tens of thousands of aircraft and thousands of American soldiers passed through on their way to the African and European fronts. The American presence left a lasting cultural mark on Natal —from chewing gum and news of the wider world to encounters that shaped the city—, and is remembered today at the Centro Cultural Trampolim da Vitória.
Today Rio Grande do Norte is a byword for sun and beach. Natal, the 'city of the sun', spreads out beside the giant dunes of Genipabu, crossed by buggy on one of the most famous outings in the Northeast. To the south, Pipa combines red falésias, dolphins, turtles and a cosmopolitan air that turned it into a mecca for young travelers.
The state, sitting right on the corner where Brazil bends from north to south, claims one of the best climates and the warmest, clearest waters in the country. The memory of the scholar Luís da Câmara Cascudo, the great Brazilian folklorist born in Natal, also runs through Potiguar cultural identity.
Rio Grande do Sul has been inhabited for some twelve thousand years, according to the archaeological remains. At the time of colonization, the vast grassland of the Pampa was home to the Charrúa and Minuano peoples and to the Xokleng and Kaingang of the highlands, as well as the Guaraní of the west.
From 1627 onward, Spanish Jesuits founded the famous Guaraní reductions on the eastern bank of the Uruguay river. The Sete Povos das Missões —among them São Miguel Arcanjo, whose ruins are today a World Heritage Site— gathered tens of thousands of Indigenous people in a unique experiment in Christian and Guaraní community, with an architecture, a music and an art of its own, until its destruction after the Treaty of Madrid.
For centuries the south was a shifting, bloody frontier between the crowns of Portugal and Spain, which fought over control of the Banda Oriental and the Pampa. In 1737, brigadier José da Silva Pais founded the fort of Rio Grande, the first stable Portuguese settlement. In 1742, Portuguese settlers arriving from the Azores founded Porto dos Casais, the future Porto Alegre.
The Treaty of Madrid of 1750, which tried to fix the boundaries by ceding the missions to Portugal, set off the Guaraní War: the Guaraní of the Sete Povos, led by figures such as Sepé Tiaraju, refused to leave their lands and were crushed by the joint Spanish-Portuguese troops. The frontier went on being disputed for decades.
The extensive cattle ranching of the Pampa forged the Brazilian gaúcho: the horseman of the estancias, with his mate, his bombachas, his facón and his churrasco, symbols of a frontier culture shared with Argentina and Uruguay. The great colonial industry was charque —beef salted and dried in the sun—, produced above all in the charqueadas of Pelotas with slave labor, which fed the enslaved populations of the rest of Brazil.
That cattle economy and that identity on horseback gave the state a character of its own, proudly regional, with its traditionalism, its nativist music and its gaúcho tradition centers (CTGs), which survive to this day.
The most glorious episode in gaúcho history is the Farroupilha Revolution, which began on September 19, 1835 and ran until 1845: the longest rebellion in the history of Brazil. Led by Bento Gonçalves da Silva, the ranchers of the south —fed up with the taxes that burdened charque against the imported product— rose against the Empire and went as far as to proclaim, in 1836, the independent Rio-Grandense Republic (or Republic of Piratini).
The Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi joined the cause: he fought for the farrapos and helped proclaim the short-lived Juliana Republic in neighboring Santa Catarina. After ten years of war, the farrapos signed peace in 1845, rejoining the Empire with honors. The epic left a strong sense of regional identity that the state celebrates every September 20 in the Semana Farroupilha.
In the nineteenth century, Rio Grande do Sul received intense European settlement. The first German immigrants landed in 1824 and settled at São Leopoldo, in the valley of the Rio dos Sinos; the Italians arrived from 1875 onward —some 60,000 of them by 1889— and populated the valleys of the Serra Gaúcha.
Out of that inheritance came Brazilian wine from the Bento Gonçalves and Caxias do Sul region —today the country's largest winegrowing hub—, alpine-looking towns such as Gramado and Canela, with their Natal Luz and Festa da Uva festivals, and a distinctive cooking and architecture that give the serra an unmistakably European look.
Rio Grande do Sul gave Brazil one of its most decisive political figures: Getúlio Vargas, born in São Borja, who was president of the state in 1928 and reached the presidency of the country after the Revolution of 1930, led in good part by gaúchos. Vargas would dominate Brazilian politics for almost a quarter of a century, between the Estado Novo and his return through the ballot box and tragic suicide in 1954.
That political weight, together with its economic strength —agriculture, livestock, industry and wine— and its intense cultural life, made the state one of the great protagonists of the contemporary history of Brazil, with Porto Alegre, on the shore of Lake Guaíba, as its great urban center.
In the Campos de Cima da Serra, the state keeps one of its greatest natural treasures: the Itaimbezinho and Fortaleza canyons, in the Aparados da Serra and Serra Geral national parks, with vertical walls hundreds of meters high, waterfalls that plunge into the void and araucaria forests.
Reached from the town of Cambará do Sul, on the border with Santa Catarina, these canyons —among the deepest in South America— round off a geography that runs from the endless Pampa to the cold, misty highlands of Brazil's far south.
Guanabara bay, inhabited by the Tupinambá, was in the sixteenth century the stage of the dispute between Portugal and France. In 1555 the French navigator Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon founded there 'France Antarctique', an attempt at a Protestant and Catholic colony that allied itself with the local Indigenous people.
To drive them out, the Portuguese sent an expedition under Estácio de Sá, who on March 1, 1565 founded the city of São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro and created the Royal Captaincy of Rio de Janeiro. After years of fighting —in which Estácio de Sá himself was killed— and with the help of the Jesuits Manuel da Nóbrega and José de Anchieta, the French were finally defeated in 1567.
Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Rio grew as a sugar center —production shifted here from São Vicente and came to include more than a hundred engenhos— and as a stronghold of the South Atlantic. But its great leap came with the Minas Gerais gold rush at the end of the seventeenth century: Rio became the natural port of exit for the metal, linked to the interior by the 'Caminho Novo' and the 'Caminho Velho' (which ran down to Paraty).
The mining boom tipped Brazil's economic axis toward the southeast. In recognition of that new weight, in 1763 the capital of the colony was moved from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro, which became the most important city in Portuguese Brazil.
In 1808, fleeing Napoleon's troops, the entire Portuguese royal family crossed the Atlantic and settled in Rio de Janeiro. For the first time in history, a colony became the seat of government of its own empire: Dom João (the future João VI) opened the ports, founded the Banco do Brasil, the Royal Press, the Botanical Garden and the Royal Military Academy, and raised Brazil to the rank of a United Kingdom with Portugal.
After independence in 1822, Rio was the capital of the Empire of Brazil until 1889 and then of the Republic until 1960. Here the emperors were crowned, slavery was abolished and the Republic was proclaimed. In 1834 the city became a 'Neutral Municipality' and the capital of the province of Rio de Janeiro moved to Niterói.
In the nineteenth century, the Vale do Paraíba fluminense —in the interior of the state— became the world's largest coffee producer, sustained by a massive enslaved workforce. The coffee barons of towns such as Vassouras piled up enormous fortunes and decisive political power in the Empire, and their decline after abolition in 1888 scarred the region for good.
In the cool mountains of the serra fluminense, emperor Pedro II had Petrópolis built, the 'imperial city', where the court spent its summers and where the Imperial Museum today keeps the crown and the throne of the Empire. Nearby, Teresópolis and the Serra dos Órgãos round out a temperate mountain region a short hop from the capital.
With the proclamation of the Republic in 1889 and the Constitution of 1891, the city of Rio de Janeiro became the Federal District, capital of the country, and a showcase for monumental urban reforms in the early twentieth century. When the capital moved to Brasília in 1960, the old Federal District became a state of its own: the state of Guanabara, reduced to the city.
During the military dictatorship, the government of Ernesto Geisel decreed in 1974 the merger of the small state of Guanabara with the state of Rio de Janeiro. The union took effect on March 15, 1975: Guanabara became a municipality and the city of Rio de Janeiro became the capital of the enlarged state, as we know it today.
The carioca landscape —forest-covered mountains dropping to the sea, Copacabana and Ipanema, the Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon, Christ the Redeemer atop Corcovado (unveiled in 1931) and Sugarloaf— was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 2012 as a cultural landscape. It is one of the most spectacular urban settings in the world and Brazil's tourist emblem, host of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games.
Rio is also the cradle of modern Brazilian popular culture: this is where samba was born, along with the carnival of the Sambadrome samba schools and, in the 1950s, the bossa nova of Tom Jobim, Vinicius de Moraes and João Gilberto. Even though the capital moved to Brasília, Rio remains the country's great cultural showcase.
Beyond the capital, the state offers a coastline of extraordinary variety. To the east, the Região dos Lagos brings together cosmopolitan Búzios —which Brigitte Bardot made fashionable in the 1960s—, Cabo Frio and Arraial do Cabo, with crystal-clear waters of Caribbean color.
To the west stretches the Costa Verde, with Paraty —the old port of exit for gold, today a colonial jewel and a World Heritage Site—, Angra dos Reis and its hundreds of islands, and wild Ilha Grande, with its Atlantic Forest and its paradise beaches. From the sea to the sierra, the state of Rio packs in some of the best-loved landscapes in all of Brazil.
The territory of Rondônia, in the southwestern Amazon, was for millennia home to numerous Indigenous peoples, many of whom still live in the state. Bandeirantes from São Paulo crossed the region from Mato Grosso as early as the sixteenth century, in search of Indigenous people and metals.
To secure the border against Spain, in 1776 the Portuguese raised the imposing Forte Príncipe da Beira, on the bank of the Guaporé river, in present-day Costa Marques: one of the largest colonial fortifications in the Amazon, today a historic monument deep in the forest.
The modern history of Rondônia is marked by the rubber boom of the late nineteenth century, which filled the Amazon with seringueiros, and by a titanic undertaking: the Madeira-Mamoré railway. Driven by the American businessman Percival Farquhar, it was meant to carry the rubber of Bolivia and Acre out past the unnavigable rapids of the Madeira river, in fulfillment of the Treaty of Petrópolis of 1903.
Built between 1907 and 1912 —366 kilometers of track deep in the forest—, it took thousands of lives through malaria, yellow fever and other diseases: the official records speak of some 1,500 dead, though popular estimates run far higher, hence its nickname, 'the devil's railway' or 'the railway of death'. The first train ran on August 1, 1912, when Amazonian rubber was already collapsing in the face of Asian competition.
The state is named after Marshal Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, a soldier and engineer who at the beginning of the twentieth century strung telegraph lines through the forest —he reached the region around 1906— connecting the remote western frontier with the rest of the country.
Rondon founded and headed the Serviço de Proteção aos Índios (SPI), a pioneering body in Brazilian Indigenous policy, and became famous for his motto: 'die if you must, kill never'. The territory was renamed Rondônia in his honor. Earlier, in 1943, the Território Federal do Guaporé had been created, with its capital at Porto Velho; it was renamed Rondônia in 1956.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Rondônia was the great destination of the state-directed colonization of the Amazon. Drawn by tax incentives from the military government and by the promise of cheap land, thousands of families from the south and southeast arrived along the BR-364 highway —paved in those years— in search of a new life.
The result was dizzying population growth: from around 70,000 inhabitants in 1960 to more than half a million in 1980. But the rushed occupation also set off heavy deforestation: by the end of the 1980s it was estimated that close to a third of the territory had already been cleared, and Rondônia became a worldwide symbol of the advance of the agricultural frontier over the forest.
The discovery of gold and of cassiterite (tin ore) also fed the population boom, with waves of garimpeiros. In 1981, after years as a federal territory, Rondônia was finally raised to the rank of state —the 23rd of the federation—, and in January 1982 its first governor took office, Colonel Jorge Teixeira de Oliveira.
In the twenty-first century, the construction of the great Santo Antônio and Jirau hydroelectric plants on the Madeira river, with a combined capacity of more than 7,000 MW and pioneering in their use of bulb turbines, transformed the economy and the landscape of the state once again.
Porto Velho, the capital, on the bank of the Madeira river, was born precisely in the heat of the Madeira-Mamoré railway and is today the heart of a state that combines agribusiness, cattle, energy and large areas of Amazon rainforest. The railway's old sheds and locomotives, now turned into a museum, recall the epic and the tragedy that gave rise to the city.
Few states sum up the tensions of the contemporary Amazon as Rondônia does: the developmentalist, colonizing drive on one side, and on the other the defense of the forest and of the rights of the Indigenous peoples that Marshal Rondon himself had sought to protect.
Roraima, in the northern corner of Brazil, is a singular territory within the Amazon: alongside the rainforest stretch vast savannas —the lavrado, some 44,000 km²— and rise the tepuis, the sheer-walled tablelands of the ancient Guiana Shield. On the triple border with Venezuela and Guyana stands Mount Roraima (2,772 m), which gives the state its name and whose plateau inspired the adventure literature of the nineteenth century.
The Rio Branco, the state's main watercourse, shapes its whole geography. This is the ancestral land of numerous Indigenous peoples, among them the Yanomami of the rainforest and the Macuxi, Wapixana, Taurepang, Ingarikó, Patamona and Ye'kuana of the savannas and the highlands.
Because of its sheer remoteness, Roraima was one of the last regions effectively incorporated into Brazil. In the eighteenth century, to secure possession of the Rio Branco valley against Spanish and Dutch incursions, in 1775 the Portuguese raised the Forte São Joaquim, at the confluence of the Uraricoera and Tacutu rivers, a key piece in the conquest of the region.
For a long time, cattle raising on the savannas —with large ranches of feral cattle— was practically the only economic activity of this remote northern frontier, cut off from the rest of the country.
Roraima was created as the Território Federal do Rio Branco on September 13, 1943, carved out of Amazonas; its first governor arrived in June 1944. In 1962 it was renamed Território Federal de Roraima, and finally the Constitution of 1988 raised it to the rank of state on October 5 of that year.
Its capital, Boa Vista, is the only Brazilian capital lying entirely in the northern hemisphere, and stands out for its radial street plan, with avenues fanning out from the civic center beside the Rio Branco, an unusual piece of town planning in Brazil.
From the late 1980s, the gold rush led tens of thousands of garimpeiros to invade the lands of the Yanomami, causing a humanitarian catastrophe: disease, violence, mercury contamination and heavy Indigenous mortality that shook the country and the world.
In 1992, after years of national and international campaigning, the government demarcated the Yanomami Indigenous Land, the largest Indigenous reserve in Brazil. Even so, invasions by illegal miners have been repeated in the decades since, and the Yanomami health crisis erupted again in recent years as one of the great social tragedies of the country.
The other great Indigenous territory of the state is Raposa Serra do Sol, the setting of one of the most important legal debates in Brazilian history. Inhabited mainly by Macuxi, Wapixana, Ingarikó, Taurepang and Patamona, it was ratified by decree in 2005 as a single continuous Indigenous land, which set the original peoples against the rice growers and cattle ranchers who occupied the area.
On March 19, 2009, the Supreme Federal Court upheld the continuous demarcation and ordered the non-Indigenous occupants to leave, in a landmark ruling that set precedent on the territorial rights of Indigenous peoples throughout Brazil. The reserve is today the seat of the great assemblies of Roraima's Indigenous movement.
In recent years, Roraima has become the main gateway for Venezuelan migration into Brazil: hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the crisis in the neighboring country have entered through the Pacaraima border, profoundly transforming cities such as Boa Vista and posing enormous challenges of reception.
Half Amazon rainforest and half savanna, with its age-old tepuis and its vast Indigenous lands, Roraima is a living frontier, remote and multicultural, where the hottest debates of contemporary Brazil converge: Indigenous rights, mining, deforestation and international migration.
The coast of Santa Catarina was inhabited by the Carijó (Tupí-Guaraní) people and, inland, by the Xokleng and the Kaingang. The first permanent Portuguese settlements appeared in the seventeenth century: São Francisco do Sul, founded around 1658, and above all Nossa Senhora do Desterro —today Florianópolis—, established in 1673 by the bandeirante Francisco Dias Velho on the island of Santa Catarina.
Between 1748 and 1756, the Portuguese crown promoted the arrival of some five thousand Azorean immigrants —from the Azores islands— to settle and secure the southern coast. Those colonists left a deep mark on the culture, architecture, religious life and artisanal fishing of the catarinense coast, with their festas do Divino and their renda de bilro (bobbin lace).
Because of its strategic position on the route south, the island of Santa Catarina was fortified in the eighteenth century with a system of fortresses —Anhatomirim, Santa Cruz de Ratones, São José da Ponta Grossa— to defend access to the region against the Spanish and other powers.
In 1777, after a brief Spanish occupation, the Treaty of San Ildefonso recognized the island as a Portuguese possession, consolidating Lusitanian control over the catarinense coast. Those fortresses, restored today, are among the most visited historic sites in Florianópolis.
In the nineteenth century, Santa Catarina received heavy German and Italian immigration that settled the inland valleys. The Germans founded São Pedro de Alcântara (1829) and, above all, Blumenau (1850), created by the pharmacist Hermann Blumenau, and Joinville (Colônia Dona Francisca, 1851); the Italians populated the south of the state.
From that legacy came a thriving textile and metalworking industry, towns built in enxaimel (half-timbered) architecture and traditions such as the Blumenau Oktoberfest, the largest beer festival in the Americas. That European stamp, added to the Azorean one along the coast, gives Santa Catarina a cultural identity very different from the rest of Brazil.
Santa Catarina was the stage of two remarkable rebel episodes. In 1839, at the height of the Farroupilha Revolution, the Italian Giuseppe Garibaldi helped proclaim in Laguna the short-lived Juliana Republic, an extension of the gaúcho insurrection into catarinense lands.
Later, between 1912 and 1916, the interior of the state —on the border with Paraná— was the setting of the Guerra do Contestado, one of the bloodiest social conflicts in Brazilian history: thousands of poor peasants, stirred by a messianic religious fervor around monks such as José María, took on the state, the army and the powerful railway and timber company (the Lumber Company) that was building the São Paulo–Rio Grande line and driving the caboclos off their land. The repression was brutal.
After the proclamation of the Republic, the capital was a leading stage of the Federalist Revolution of the 1890s. In 1894, the city of Nossa Senhora do Desterro was renamed Florianópolis in honor of president Floriano Peixoto, who had put down the revolt —a name it keeps to this day.
Over the course of the twentieth century, Florianópolis went from fishing village to modern capital and to one of the great tourist and technology hubs of southern Brazil, with one of the highest qualities of life in the country.
Santa Catarina is today one of Brazil's great tourist destinations. The island of Florianópolis, 'Floripa', offers more than forty beaches, lagoons and a lively surf and summer scene; the coast also holds modern Balneário Camboriú, Bombinhas and its diving, Garopaba and Praia do Rosa, a mecca for surfing and for watching the humpback whales that breed off the shore.
Inland, the Serra Catarinense, with São Joaquim and Urubici, is the coldest corner of Brazil, one of the few places in the country where it snows in winter, with its apple orchards, its high-altitude wines and its mountain landscapes. From sea to highland, the state packs in a diversity rarely found in the tropics.
The territory of Sergipe, inhabited by Tupinambá peoples and by Kariri groups inland, remained for decades an in-between strip separating the colony's two great sugar poles: Salvador da Bahia to the south and Pernambuco to the north. Its conquest answered a strategic need: to secure the overland route between the two and to protect the coast from attacks and from French trade.
In January 1590, the Portuguese captain Cristóvão de Barros subdued the Indigenous population in a bloody campaign and founded, by the mouth of the Sergipe river, the town of São Cristóvão de Sergipe d'El Rei, after raising the fort of Cotinguiba. It is the fourth oldest city in Brazil.
São Cristóvão was the capital of the captaincy throughout the colonial period and preserves a remarkable baroque ensemble: its Praça São Francisco, with the Franciscan church and convent, was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 2010 as one of the finest examples of Iberian urban architecture in the New World.
During Dutch rule over the Nordeste (1637-1645), Sergipe also suffered occupation and a severe economic crisis. After the expulsion of the Dutch, the region resumed its development around sugar cane, cattle and, later, cotton.
For much of its history, Sergipe depended administratively and economically on Bahia. Only in 1820 —on the eve of independence— was it set up as an autonomous captaincy, separate from neighboring Bahia, which cemented its identity as a political unit of its own.
In the nineteenth century, writers born in the state such as Tobias Barreto and Sílvio Romero, key figures of the 'Recife School' and of Brazilian critical thought, projected Sergipe onto the country's cultural and intellectual landscape far beyond what its small size would suggest.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the sugar mill owners pushed for the capital to be moved to a site with a port able to take deeper-draft ships, in order to ease sugar exports. So, on March 17, 1855, the capital passed from inland São Cristóvão to a new, planned city beside the sea: Aracaju.
Laid out on a grid by the engineer Sebastião José Basílio Pirro, Aracaju was one of the first Brazilian capitals conceived with a regular urban plan, after Salvador and Teresina. Its growth made it the state's great commercial and political center.
Sergipe is crossed along its northern border by the great São Francisco river, the 'river of national integration', which separates it from Alagoas. On that river, the Xingó dam formed the striking Cânion do Xingó: a maze of rock walls and water of an intense emerald color, toured by catamaran from Canindé de São Francisco, one of the great natural attractions of the entire Nordeste.
The Xingó region also holds important archaeological sites, with traces of ancient peoples who lived along the banks of the São Francisco, and a museum devoted to that riverside archaeology.
At just about 21,900 km², Sergipe is the smallest state in Brazil by area, which takes nothing away from its historical and cultural density. Aracaju, with its city beaches, its walkways over the mangroves (the well-known passadiços do caranguejo) and its lively riverfront, rounds out a state that combines colonial heritage, river landscapes and Nordeste tradition.
From baroque São Cristóvão to the canyons of Xingó, by way of modern Aracaju, small Sergipe packs into little territory a good part of the history of the sugar-growing, river-bound Nordeste.
São Paulo was born on January 25, 1554, when the Jesuits José de Anchieta and Manuel da Nóbrega founded the Colégio de São Paulo de Piratininga on the plateau, some seventy kilometers from the coast of São Vicente —the town Martim Afonso de Sousa had founded in 1532—, to evangelize the Tupí-Guaraní peoples.
From that modest inland town the bandeirantes set out: men such as Antônio Raposo Tavares, Fernão Dias Paes and Bartolomeu Bueno who, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, pushed thousands of kilometers into the sertão in search of Indigenous people to enslave and of precious metals. In doing so they drove Brazil's frontiers far beyond the line of the Treaty of Tordesillas, giving the country much of its enormous present-day size.
In the nineteenth century, coffee turned São Paulo into the richest province in the country. The first estates appeared around 1817 in the Vale do Paraíba —enriching towns such as Bananal, Lorena and Guaratinguetá and their 'coffee barons'—, and from 1870 the crop spread to the extremely fertile 'tierras roxas' of the Oeste Paulista, around Ribeirão Preto, which came to hold the largest and most productive coffee plantations in the world.
The coffee fortunes financed railways linking the estates to the port of Santos —the first stretch was completed in 1867— and tipped São Paulo into modernity. Coffee dominated Brazilian economics and politics for decades.
The expansion of coffee and the abolition of slavery in 1888 drew mass immigration. Between 1888 and 1900, of the nearly 900,000 foreigners who reached the state, more than 600,000 were Italians, who came to outnumber native-born Brazilians in the capital. To them were added Portuguese, Spaniards, Germans, eastern Europeans, Syrians and Lebanese.
In 1908, with the ship Kasato Maru, Japanese immigration began: São Paulo today is home to the largest Japanese community outside Japan, with the Liberdade district as its heart. The old Hospedaria dos Imigrantes, now a museum, took in millions of new arrivals. That mixture of peoples made São Paulo one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world.
During the First Republic, the alliance between the coffee oligarchy of São Paulo and the dairy oligarchy of Minas Gerais —the política do café com leite— controlled national power, alternating in the presidency. But São Paulo was also a focus of renewal: the Modern Art Week of 1922, held at the Teatro Municipal with figures such as Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila do Amaral, revolutionized Brazilian art and culture.
Two years later, in 1924, the city lived through the tenentista Revolution, with fighting in the streets, a symptom of the unrest against the old order that would erupt in 1930.
After the 1930 Revolution that brought Getúlio Vargas to power and pushed aside the paulista oligarchy, São Paulo rose up in arms. The Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932 —also called the Paulista War— broke out on July 9, 1932, when the state demanded a new constitution and an end to the provisional government. The movement took as its symbol the initials MMDC, for four young men killed in the demonstrations.
After 87 days of fighting and some 934 official deaths, São Paulo was defeated militarily; but the uprising hastened the calling of a Constituent Assembly, which enacted the Constitution of 1934. July 9 is today the state's greatest civic date and a symbol of paulista pride.
The capital built up by coffee was poured into industry: by the early twentieth century São Paulo was already a major manufacturing hub, and after 1930 it consolidated itself as the industrial and financial heart of Brazil, with the metalworking belt of the ABC paulista (Santo André, São Bernardo, São Caetano), where decades later Lula's new unionism would be born. Industry drew millions of migrants from all over the country, above all from the Nordeste.
Today the city of São Paulo is the largest metropolis in the southern hemisphere, a cosmopolitan giant of more than twelve million people, the cultural, culinary and financial capital of Brazil.
Beyond the megalopolis, the state offers destinations of great variety. In the Serra da Mantiqueira, Campos do Jordão —the 'Brazilian Switzerland'— is a cool-weather mountain retreat, famous for its classical music festival and its alpine feel.
Along the Litoral Norte, between the Serra do Mar and the Atlantic, come Ubatuba with its dozens of beaches, the island of Ilhabela and its Atlantic Forest, and Guarujá. And on the historic coast, old Santos —the main port in Latin America, and the one through which the coffee that enriched the state shipped out— still has the stadium where Pelé shone, a global symbol of Brazilian football.
The territory of Tocantins was inhabited by Indigenous peoples such as the Xerente, Karajá, Apinajé and Krahô, many of whom still live in the state. Colonial occupation arrived with the bandeirantes, who as early as the seventeenth century were crossing the region along the great Tocantins and Araguaia rivers, and with the Jesuits, who founded mission villages in places such as Palma (today Paranã) and Duro (today Dianópolis).
With the gold strike that gave rise to the Captaincy of Goiás in 1722, the north filled with garimpos: between 1730 and 1740, what is now Tocantins was among the biggest gold-producing regions, with towns such as Natividade and Arraias. Once the metal ran out in the late eighteenth century, the area fell into a long economic decline, turning to cattle ranching in the sertão.
Distance from the Goiás government, and neglect by it, fed a strong separatist feeling in the north from early on. As far back as 1809, the ouvidor Joaquim Teotônio Segurado created the Comarca de São João das Duas Barras, and in 1821 he went so far as to proclaim a short-lived 'Autonomous Government of Tocantins', swiftly put down.
The autonomist attempts recurred through the nineteenth century (1863, 1889) and the twentieth, with the Movement for the Creation of the State of Tocantins, led in 1956 by Feliciano Machado Braga. A struggle of nearly two centuries, sustained by Indigenous people, quilombolas and sertão ranchers who demanded emancipation from the distant government in Goiânia.
The dream came true with the Constitution of 1988, which created the state of Tocantins on October 5 of that year, splitting it off from the northern half of Goiás: it is the newest in the Brazilian federation. Its great political architect was José Wilson Siqueira Campos, a constituent deputy and rapporteur of the subcommittee on the states, who became the first governor (1989-1991) and the central figure of the new unit.
The state was officially installed on January 1, 1989, with Miracema do Tocantins as provisional capital, while the definitive capital was planned from scratch.
To govern the new state a planned capital was built, Palmas, on a site chosen between the municipalities of Porto Nacional and Taquaruçu do Porto, on the banks of the Tocantins river. It was officially created on May 20, 1989 and installed on January 1, 1990, after the move from the provisional capital of Miracema.
Designed with a layout of broad avenues and symmetrical blocks, Palmas was the last capital city founded in Brazil in the twentieth century, heir to the tradition of planned capitals such as Goiânia, Belo Horizonte and Brasilia. In a few decades it went from open country to regional metropolis.
Tocantins spreads across the heart of the Cerrado, the Brazilian savanna, between its two great rivers: the Tocantins, which gives it its name, and the Araguaia, which marks its western border. In the Araguaia lies the Ilha do Bananal, the largest river island in the world, a wildlife sanctuary and home to Indigenous peoples, protected in part by the Parque Nacional do Araguaia.
The great rivers made the state a historic axis of navigation and communication in the middle of Brazil, and today they underpin waterway projects seeking to connect inland farm production with the ports of the north.
The great treasure of Tocantins is Jalapão: a vast stretch of Cerrado, some 250 kilometers from Palmas, with orange dunes, crystal-clear rivers, waterfalls and the fervedouros, springs so clear and bubbling that they push the bather upward and will not let them sink.
It is also the land of capim dourado, the 'golden grass' from which quilombola and traditional communities weave a shimmering craftwork known throughout Brazil. One of the most impressive ecotourism and adventure destinations in the country, and the emblem of a young state that makes its all but untouched nature its greatest source of pride.