Brazil travel guide

Bandeira, M, This Earth, that Sky: Poems by Manuel Bandeira (University of California Press). The oldest member of the modernist movement, and one of Brazil’s greatest poets, master of the short, intense lyric.

Kricher, J, A Neotropical Companion (Princeton University Press). A very clear, intelligent introduction to the ecosystems, biology and botany of the neotropical region.

The earliest Portuguese colonizers to arrive in Brazil in the 16th century faced many problems in building their houses, forts, churches and other necessary structures. First of all there was a lack of building materials, such as bricks, roof tiles and mortar. Second, there were few trained craftsmen, such as carpenters and bricklayers, in the colony. They therefore had to improvise by developing unusual building techniques and trying different materials. In the hinterland, in places like São Paulo, Goiás and Minas Gerais the majority of the houses were built with taipa de pilão. This technique consisted in using a wooden form to build thick walls. These forms were filled with a mixture of clay, vegetable fibres, horsehair, ox blood and dung. This paste was then compacted with a pestle and allowed to dry for two to three days before the next layer was added. The roof tiles were often moulded on a female slave’s thigh and dried in the sun.

It is quite easy to identify a house in Brazilian colonial style. Their shapes, colours and building techniques remained virtually unchanged for almost three centuries. Firstly, they always had large, visible roofs, made with red clay tiles, finishing in eaves extending beyond the walls. All the buildings were painted in a white wash, with bright colours used only on window and door frames. These were made of wood and had, mostly, elegant arches at the top. In the 19th century, sash windows with squared 10 sq cm pieces of glass were added in many houses, as can be seen in cities like Paraty, Ouro Preto and Salvador.

The most recent trend is the postmodern. Many business centres, shopping malls and residential buildings are being designed in a style which uses coloured mirror glass, granite and stylized structures reminiscent of classical temples.

Houses, public buildings and other colonial civic edifices were generally unelaborate. All the refinement, style and sophistication in art, architecture and decoration was lavished on churches, convents and monasteries. The great religious orders, such as the Jesuits, Franciscans, Carmelites and Benedictines brought to Brazil the latest artistic trends from Europe, mainly the Baroque and Rococo.

The other current generated by the Semana da Arte Moderna looked to the future for its inspiration for Brazilian-ness. Architects such as Oscar Niemeyer, Lúcio Costa, Affonso Eduardo Reidy, the landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx and many others started to design functional and spacious buildings, with large open areas and pilotis (pillars carrying a building, leaving the ground floor open). The use of concrete and glass was intense and the masterpiece of the Brazilian architectural modernism is Brasília, the capital, planned from scratch in the 1950 by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer.

Even when the coffee planters, in the second half of 19th century, started to become extremely rich and fond of imported fashions, they would build their urban mansions in the neoclassic style, but still keep their farm houses with large roofs, sometimes adding small neoclassic details in windows, doors and internal decoration. Good examples of this 19th-century rural architecture can be found very close to Rio de Janeiro, in cities like Vassouras, Valença, Barra do Piraí and Bananal, where some of the old farm houses are open to visitors.

The beginning of 19th century brought a major change in the history of Brazilian architecture. When Napoleon invaded Portugal in 1808, the Portuguese royal family and some 15,000 nobles and wealthy families fled to Rio de Janeiro, bringing with them their own view of what was sophisticated in the arts. In 1816 the king, Dom João VI, invited a group of French artists (The French Artistic Mission) to Brazil to introduce the most recent European trends in painting, sculpture, decoration and architecture. This was the beginning of the neoclassic style in Brazil. An Imperial Academy of Fine Arts was created and all the new government buildings were built in neoclassic style. The great name of this period was the French architect Grandjean de Montigny, who planned and built many houses and public buildings throughout the city of Rio de Janeiro.

The rich and famous also wanted their houses in this newly fashionable style, which revolutionized the Brazilian way of building. The large roofs were now hidden by a small wall, the plat band. Windows and doors acquired round arches and walls were painted in ochres and light tones of pink. Public buildings and churches started to look like ancient Greek temples, with triangular pediments and columns. This new style was not best suited to Brazil’s climate. The earlier, large colonial roofs were much more efficient in dealing with heavy tropical rains and, in consequence, the neoclassic style never became popular in the countryside.

The first movement sought its true Brazilian style in the past, in the colonial period. Architects like Lúcio Costa, studied the techniques, materials and designs of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, soon producing houses with a colonial look, but also combining elements which were only previously found in baroque churches. These included pediments and decorated door frames. The style was called neocolonial and remained popular until the 1940s, especially in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

In northeastern Brazil, religious figures are also made in clay, for instance the unglazed, life-sized saints made from red clay in Tracunhaém, near Recife. Another centre for similar work is Goiana, also in Pernambuco. A third place from which the ceramics are even more famous is Alto da Moura, near Caruaru (Pernambuco – see page). Here, Mestre Vitalino began modelling scraps of clay into little figures depicting everyday life (work, festivals, dancing, political events). He died in 1963, but the tradition that he started has continued and is known throughout Brazil.

Even before the discover of rich mineral deposits in the interior of the country, legends told of mountains full of precious stones. Prospectors looked for diamonds and emeralds as well as gold and silver to make them wealthy. The existence of gems was known about almost from the earliest days of the Portuguese colony, from the reports given to the new arrivals by the indígenas and from scattered discoveries of different stones. But there was nothing to bring riches on the scale of the silver and gold found in the Spanish colonies. Gold was found in Minas Gerais in the 17th century and diamonds in 1725 at Diamantina (Minas Gerais) and thus Brazil’s mineral wealth began to appreciate. The search for new deposits has never flagged.

Commercially mined stones include: diamonds, found in Minas Gerais, Roraima, Bahia, Tocantins, Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul. Brazil was the world’s largest producer of diamonds until South Africa entered the market in the 19th century. Emeralds, not discovered in Brazil until 1963 (many green beryls had been mined before then, but were known not to be true emeralds), are now mined in Bahia, Minas Gerais and Goiás. Aquamarine is a clear blue beryl from Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Bahia, Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo. Ruby and sapphire are two shades of the same mineral, corundum, the former rich red, the latter a deep blue. Rubies are found in Santa Catarina, sapphires in Minas Gerais. The two most valued forms of topaz found are the rare Imperial Topaz from Ouro Preto (Minas Gerais), which comes in a range of colours from honey-coloured through shades of red to pink, and Blue Topaz from Minas Gerais and Rondônia.

Ceará, in the north, is famous for its lace-making, and beautiful pieces are sold all over Brazil. In other parts of the north, hammocks and other woven items are found. The hammock is, of course, an essential household item and you may well need to buy one if you are travelling up the Amazon on a boat. Other utilitarian articles which have become craft items are the rugs and capes made in the highlands further south, such as Minas Gerais, to keep out the night-time cold.
In the northeast, traditional costumes have their roots in the rituals of the African religions that came to Brazil with the slave trade. In southern areas where European immigration was heaviest, many traditional costumes can be seen, usually at the festivals and dances that have survived. Another type of clothing from the south is that associated with the gaúchos, the Brazilian cowboys of Rio Grande do Sul. As well as the clothes, which normally use hide in their manufacture, you may also buy saddlery, stirrups, silverware and the gourds used for drinking maté.

There are several other festivals which are almost as important to Brazilians as Carnaval. Reveillon (New Year’s Eve) is a significant event and is generally celebrated on beaches. This can be either a hedonistic party as at Copacabana and Arraial D’Ajuda with the revellers dressed in white for luck, or as a respectful candomblé ceremony in which flowers are launched into the sea at midnight as an offering to Yemanjá.

The Fiestas Juninhas (São João) are extremely popular especially in the northeast and are held around 24 June (St John’s day). Fires are built and forró is the music of choice with the festivities lasting for over a week at times. Fireworks and the co-ordinated dancing of groups called quadrilhas are also part of the celebrations.

In the north, the African and Indian cultures have mixed to form the Boi-Bumba tradition. In Amazonas, the Festa do Boi has become more commercialized but is still very impressive and popular. In Maranhão, where it is known as Bumba-Meu-Boi, the festivities are more traditional but equally as popular.

There are many Catholic saints’ days that are sometimes celebrated in conjunction with African deities (especially in Bahia). Every town has a patron saint and his or her day will be an excuse for civic festivities, in addition to those of the foundation day of the town.

Although 17th-century church decoration is often lavish there is little warning of the extraordinary theatricality which characterizes the work of the 18th century. Behind their sober façades churches open out like theatres, with the equivalent of balconies and boxes for the privileged, and a stage for the high altar with a proscenium arch and wings of carved and gilded wood. Cherubs whisper to each other or gesticulate from their perches amongst the architectural scrolls; angels, older and more decorous, recline along a cornice or flutter in two dimensions across an illusionist ceiling. The object of devotion is usually placed high above the altar on a tiered dais, surrounded by a Bernini-esque sunburst of gilded rays. A skilled exponent of this type of design was the Portuguese-born sculptor Francisco Xavier de Brito (died 1751), as in Nossa Senhora do Pilar, Ouro Preto and São Francisco de Penitência, Rio.

Xavier de Brito was largely responsible for bringing the Baroque style to Brazil and this style reaches its most ornate and theatrical in the work of Xavier de Brito’s pupil, Aleijadinho, the ‘Little Cripple’ (1738-1814) a mulatto artist who worked in the province of Minas Gerais. As by far the most famous artist in the colonial period in the whole of Latin America it is perhaps not surprising to find his name attached to an impossible number of projects, but a consideration even of the securely documented reveals a man of extraordinary passion and energy who worked as a painter, architect and, above all, sculptor. The church at Congonhas do Campo offers the most dramatic example of Aleijadinho’s art. Pilgrims paying homage to the miracle-working Bom Jesus do Matozinhos approach the church along a penitential road winding up the hill between six small chapels, each housing scenes from Christ’s Passion represented by life-size expressive statues of polychrome wood. The final ascent is up an imposing double staircase under the stony gaze of 12 judgmental prophets who variously lament, threaten or cajole, addressing the heavens, the distant horizon, each other, or the faithful on the stone steps below them. In a building beside the church a fascinating display of drawings and photographs of the many accidents and emergencies from which the Good Jesus has saved people, testifies to the continuing popularity of this shrine.

The paint equivalent to Aleijadinho’s sculptures can be found in the work of his contemporary, Manuel da Costa Ataíde (1762-1830) from Mariana, whose vividly colourful narrative scenes decorate numerous churches in Minas Gerais. Ataíde’s rococo settings are populated with solidly-built saints and angels whose rolling eyes and exaggerated gestures give them an earthy vigour sometimes at odds with the spirituality of the subject matter, as in the illusionist ceiling of São Francisco de Assis, Ouro Preto, a church whose design is traditionally attributed to Aleijadinho. Both Aleijadinho and Athayde were probably friends of the insurrectionist Tiradentes and criticisms of the Portuguese and the appalling treatment of non-European Brazilians is implicit in their work

Brazil moved from this essentially academic tradition straight into the radicalism of the early 20th century, and movements such as Cubism, Futurism, Fauvism and Constructivism were quickly translated into distinctively Brazilian idioms. Lasar Segall (1891-1957), Anita Malfatti (1896-1964) and the sculptor Vitor Brecheret (1894-1955) were pioneers of modernism, working in relative isolation before the 1922 Semana da Arte Moderna (Modern Art Week) in São Paulo drew together a group of artists and intellectuals whose influence on Brazilian culture can still be felt today. They sought to challenge established bourgeois attitudes, to shake off the traditional cultural subservience to Europe, and to draw attention to the cultural diversity and social inequality of contemporary Brazil. Emilio di Cavalcanti (1897-1976) mocked the artificiality of white middle-class socialites and championed Blac Brazilian beauty (examples in the Museu de Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo). Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) borrowed her loud colours from popular art while her imagery includes ironic reworkings of European myths about the savage cannibalistic indígenas supposed to inhabit the Brazilian jungle. Cândido Portinari (1903-1962) used murals to expose the exploitation and injustice suffered by workers and peasants, while Osvaldo Goeldi (1895-1961) explored similar themes in his powerful wood engravings. Portinari, in an interesting revival of the colonial use of azulejos, created murals in blue and white painted tiles for modern architecture such as the MES building by Costa and Niemeyer of Rio, begun in 1937, and Niemeyer’s church of São Francisco in Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (1943).

The economic strength of the middle years of the century encouraged state patronage of the arts. President Getúlio Vargas recognized that art and architecture could be used to present an image of Brazil as a modern industrialized nation, with Brasília being the culmination of this vision. Museums of Modern Art were founded in São Paulo and Rio, and in 1951 São Paulo hosted its first Bienal Internacional, which attracted abstract artists from Europe and the US and confirmed Abstraction – symbol of progress and technological modernization – as the dominant mode in Brazil during the 1950s. Rivalry between the artistic communities of Rio and São Paulo helped to produce some outstanding avant-garde art. In the 1950s Waldemar Cordeiro (1925-1973), leader of the São Paulo Grupo Ruptura, painted what at first sight appear to be rather simple geometric patterns in bright, contrasting colours, but on closer attention the flat surface seems to break up, suggesting recession, space and restless movement, in some ways prefiguring the British Op Art movement of the 1960s. The Neo-Concrete group of artists of Rio argued for the integration of art into daily life, and experimented with art that made sensory and emotional demands on the ‘spectator’ whose participation leads in turn to creation. During the early 1960s, Lygia Clark (1920-1988) made bichos (animals) out of hinged pieces of metal which, as the name implies, are like creatures with a life of their own: they can be rearranged indefinitely but because of their complexity it is impossible to predetermine what shape will result from moving a particular section. Nowadays, unfortunately, they are displayed in museums where touching is not encouraged (as in the Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo). Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) took the idea further, working with people (poor and often black) from the samba schools in the Rio favelas to create artistic ‘happenings’ involving dance, music and flamboyant costumes called parangolés (capes). The notion that a key function of art should be to shock the bourgeoisie was first voiced in the 1922 Week of Modern Art. Oiticica often succeeded, and he and other artists of the 1960s also realized another of the aims of the first modernists: to create Brazilian modern art that was not the poor relation of developments in Europe or the US. A museum of his work is now open in Rio. Other important figures of this generation include the neo-concretist painter Ivan Serpa (1923-1973), Sérgio Camargo (1930-1990), who produced textured rhythmic constructions of white on white but because they are made with off-cuts of wood they suggest the tensions between form and material, geometry and nature; and Amílcar de Castro (born 1920) whose deceptively simple sculptures are often cut from one large panel of cast iron.

No visitor to Brazil should miss visiting a colonial church. During the colonial period in Brazil the Church dominated artistic patronage, with the religious orders vying with each other to produce ever more lavish interiors. In the 17th century the Benedictines included several notable sculptors among their ranks. Much of the magnificent gilded interior of the monastery of São Bento in Rio de Janeiro is by Frei Domingos da Conceição (circa 1643-1718), who worked there during the 1660s. His Crucifixion of 1688 in the monastery of São Bento in Olinda sets up a deliberately shocking contrast between the sinuous elegance of Christ’s body and the terrible lacerations of his flesh. Frei Agostinho de Piedade (died 1661) of the Benedictine community in Salvador produced some old-fashioned terracotta reliquary busts during the 1630s and 1640s (Museu de Arte Sacra, Salvador) but the powerful Penitent Peter in Salvador’s Nossa Senhora do Monte (circa 1636), also attributed to him, prefigures the emotional intensity of subsequent generations.

It is helpful to understand Brazilian literature, even long after political independence, as a gradual and, to some extent, contradictory process of emancipation from foreign models. Every European literary movement – Romanticism, Realism, Symbolism, etc – had its Brazilian followers, but in each there was an attempt to adjust the model to local reality. A good example is the first of these, Indianism, which flourished in the mid-19th century, and produced two central figures: the poet Antônio Gonçalves Dias (1823-1864), himself partly of indigenous descent, and the novelist José de Alencar (1829-1877). It is a form of Romanticism, idealizing the noble savage, and with plots adapted from Walter Scott, and it happily ignored what was happening to real indigenous tribes at the time. However, it does express national aspirations and feelings, if in nothing else, in the nostalgia for a kind of tropical Eden expressed in perhaps the most famous Brazilian poem, Gonçalves Dias Canção do exílio: “My land has palm-trees/ where the sabiá sings. /The birds that sing here/ don’t sing like those back home.” Alencar’s novels, not all of them about Indians, are a systematic attempt to portray Brazil in its various settings, including the city. O guarani (1857), turned into a famous opera by Carlos Gomes, and Iracema (1865), are his most popular. The latter is perhaps the most complete mythical version of the Portuguese conquest, allegorized as a love affair between a native woman and an early colonist, Martim Soares. Iracema, “the virgin with the honeyed lips” dies in childbirth at the end, but the future lies with their mixed-blood son, Moacir.

After his death, Alencar was succeeded as the chief figure in Brazilian letters by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908). Perhaps Brazil’s best writer, and certainly the greatest to appear in Latin America until well into the 20th century, he had to fight against formidable obstacles: he was of relatively poor origins, was mulatto, he had a stammer and, in later life, was subject to epileptic fits. He wrote nine novels and more than 200 short stories as well as poetry and journalism. He ended his life as an establishment figure and founder of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. But his novels, especially those written after 1880, when he published Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, and the best of his stories are surprisingly subversive, covert attacks on slavery and on male power, for instance. He avoided detection by not using his own voice, hiding behind quirky, digressive narrators who are not always trustworthy. All the novels and most of the stories are set in Rio, which he hardly left, and give a remarkably varied account of the city and its different social levels. His most famous novel, Dom Casmurro (1900) is one of the best-disguised cases of an unreliable narrator in the history of the novel, and still arouses critical polemics.

Machado’s atmosphere is predominantly that of the empire, which fell in 1889, a year after the abolition of slavery. In the Republic, a younger generation, more overtly rebellious in their aims, and affected by new scientific ideas from Europe, came to the fore. If Machado is the most famous Brazilian author, perhaps Os sertões, by Euclides da Cunha (1866-1909) is the most famous book. It is an account of the Canudos campaign in the interior of the state of Bahia in 1896-1897. The campaign was a horrific failure, victory being won only at a huge cost in casualties, and Euclides da Cunha, sent to cover it as a journalist, turned this failure into an indictment of a social system, which excluded huge groups of people. Written in a dramatic, somewhat self-indulgent style, with extensive use of scientific words, it has been excellently translated as Rebellion in the Backlands.

In general, the poetry of the turn of the century was imitative and stuffy. Renewal did not come until the early 1920s, when a group of intellectuals from São Paulo, led by the unrelated Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) and Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) began the movement known as modernism. This is conveniently supposed to have begun in 1922, the centenary of political independence, with a Week of Modern Art in São Paulo; in fact it began earlier, and took until the mid-1920s to spread to the provinces. In great part, modernism’s ideology was nationalist, and though the word spanned the political spectrum, at its best it simply meant the discovery of a real Brazil behind stereotypes. Mário travelled throughout the country, attempting to understand its variety, which he embodied in his major prose-work, the comic ‘rhapsody’ Macunaíma (1928), which in its plot and language attempts to construct a unity out of a complex racial and regional mix. Also in 1928, Oswald launched the ‘anthropophagist’, or cannibalist programme, which proclaimed that Brazilian writers should imitate their native predecessors, and fully digest European culture: a new kind of Indianism, perhaps.

The most enduring artistic works to have emerged from modernism, however, are poetic – two of Brazil’s major modern poets, Manuel Bandeira (1886-1968) and Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987) were early enthusiasts of modernism, and corresponded at length with Mário. Bandeira, the older man, made a slow transition to the new, freer style; his poems, often short and based on everyday events or images, nevertheless have a power and rhythmic accuracy that are deceptively simple. Drummond’s poetry is more self-conscious, and went through a complex intellectual development, including a period of political enthusiasm during the Second World War, followed by disillusionment with the beginning of the Cold War. His themes, including some remarkable love-poetry addressed by a 50-year-old to a younger woman, and a lifelong attachment to Itabira, the small town in Minas Gerais where he was born, are very varied. Readers without Portuguese can best approach Drummond, widely regarded as Brazil’s greatest poet, through an excellent anthology, Traveling in the Family.

The 1930s were a crucial decade. With increasing political mobilization, the growth of cities, and of an aspiring middle class, literature began to look to a wider audience; however, at first, it still reflected the dominance of rural life. The realism of this period, which often had a strong regionalist bias, had its raison d’être in a society still divided by huge social and/or geographical differences, and indeed played its part in diminishing those differences. Many of the first group came from the economically and socially backward northeast. José Lins do Rego (1901-1957) is perhaps the most characteristic figure. He was highly influenced by the ideas of Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987), whose Casa grande e sensually (The Masters and the Slaves), published in 1933, was one of the most important and readable of Brazilian books. It is a study of the slave-based, sugar- plantation society, and one of the first works to appreciate the contribution made by Blacks to Brazil’s culture. It remains, however, very paternalist, and Lins do Rego’s fiction, beginning with the semi-autobiographical Menino de engenho, reflects that, commenting on the poverty and filth of the (ex-)slave-quarters as if they were totally natural. His ‘sugar-cane cycle’ sold in large editions, in part because of its unaffected, simple style.

A greater novelist belonging to the same group is Graciliano Ramos (1892-1953). His fiction is much more aggressive, and in later life he became a communist. His masterpiece, turned into an excellent film in the 1960s, is Vedas secas, which returns to the impoverished interior of Os sertões, but concentrates on an illiterate cowhand and his family, forced from place to place by drought and social injustice; it is a courageous attempt to enter the mental world of such people. Memórias do cárcere, published after Ramos’s death, is his unflinching account of his imprisonment for a year during the Vargas regime.

The essential novelist to read for anyone visiting the south of Brazil is Érico Veríssimo (1905-1975), especially his epic trilogy collectively entitled O tempo e o vento (O continente [1949], O retrato [1951], and O arquipélago [1961]) spread over two centuries of the turbulent history of Rio Grande do Sul.

Gradually, in the 1940s and 1950s, a subtler and more adventurous fiction began to be published alongside the regionalist realism that was the major heritage of the 1930s. Three writers stand out: João Guimarães Rosa, Clarice Lispector and João Cabral de Melo Neto. João Guimarães Rosa (1908-1967) published his major novel, Grande sertão: veredas in 1956. Almost Joycean in its aspirations and linguistic innovations, it is a kind of mixture of a cowboy story and a modern version of Faustian pact with the devil. For those without stamina (and excellent Portuguese), the translation (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) is unfortunately not an adequate alternative. Rosa is best approached through his stories, those of Sagarana (particularly A hora e vez de Augusto Matraga) being perhaps the best.

The stories and novels of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) now have a considerable audience outside Brazil, as well as a huge one inside it. Her stories, especially those of Laços de família (1960), are in general set in middle-class Rio, and usually have women as their central characters. The turbulence, family hatreds, and near-madness hidden beneath routine lives are conveyed in unforgettable ways, with a language and symbolism that is poetic and adventurous without being exactly difficult (she said she fought with the Portuguese language daily). Some of her novels have over-ambitious metaphysical superstructures, and may not be to some readers’ tastes – A paixão segundo G H, for instance, concerns a housewife’s confrontation with a dead cockroach in her maid’s room, and her final decision to eat it, seen as a kind of “communion”. When at her best, in some of her journalism, in her late, deliberately semi-pornographic stories, and above all in the posthumous novel, A hora da estrela, which approaches the poor in an utterly unsentimental way, Lispector can stimulate and move like no one else.

The greatest poet of this generation is João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920-1999), whose best poetry concerns his home state, Pernambuco. The drought-ridden interior, the lush but oppressive landscape of the sugar-plantations, and the city slums are all present in the verse-play Morte e vida severina (1956), and his tight, sparse poetry often returns to the same places, or analogous ones in the several countries (most importantly, in Spain) in which he has resided as a diplomat.

The 1964 military coup, and the increasing use of torture and censorship in the late 1960s and early 1970s, had profound effects on literature, especially as they were accompanied by vast economic changes (industrialization, a building boom, huge internal migration, the opening up of the Amazon). At first, censorship was haphazard, and the 1960s liberation movements had their – increasingly desperate – Brazilian equivalents. Protest theatre had a brief boom, with Arena conta Zumbi, about a 17th-century rebel slave leader, produced by Augusto Boal (born 1931), being one of the most important. The best fictional account of those years can be found in two novels by Antônio Callado (born 1917), Quarup (1967), set in the northeast and centred on a left-wing priest, and Bar Don Juan (1971), whose focus is on the contradictions of a group of middle-class guerrillas; and in Ivan Ãngelo’s A festa (1976), set in Belo Horizonte, a funny and hard-hitting account of a varied set of people, which chronicles the impact of the ‘sex and drugs’ revolution alongside its political concerns. A remarkable documentary account of the period is ex- guerrilla (subsequently leader of the Green Party) Fernando Gabeira’s O que é isso companheiro? (1982), which chronicles his involvement in the kidnapping of the American ambassador in 1969. Poetry at this time went through a crisis of self-confidence, and it was widely thought that it had emigrated into the (marvellous) lyrics of such popular composers as Chico Buarque de Holanda and Caetano Veloso, who were also the foremost standard-bearers of political protest in the 1970s.

Racism is culturally rife in Brazil and often openly expressed in all-white company. Though there is no legal discrimination against black people, the economic and educational disparity – by default rather than intent of the Government – is such that successful Afro-Brazilians are active almost exclusively in the worlds of sport, entertainment and the arts.

Brazilian culture, however would be nothing without its African influences. Those interested in the development of Afro-Brazilian music, dance, religion, arts and cuisine will find the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Bahia and São Luís, which retain the greatest African influences, particularly fascinating. Black Pride movements are particularly strong in Bahia.

There were probably between three and five million indigenous people in Brazil when the Portuguese arrived. Today there are between 200,000 and 300,000. The effects of European colonization were devastating – whole tribes were wiped out under the Portuguese Amazon slave trade and others set to fight against each other for Portuguese advantage. Present-day tribal groups number about 220; each has a unique dialect, but most languages belong to four main linguistic families, Tupi-Guarani, Gê, Carib and Arawak. A few tribes remain uncontacted, others are exclusively nomadic, others are semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers and farmers, while some are settled groups in close contact with non-indigenous society. There is no agreement on precisely how many tribes are extant, but the Centro Ecumênico da Documentação e Informação (CEDI) of São Paulo said that of the 200 or so groups it documented, 40% have populations of less than 200 people and 77% have populations of less than 1000. Hemming underlines this depressing statistic when he reports that tribes contacted in recent decades have, as have others in previous centuries, suffered catastrophic reductions in numbers as soon as they encounter diseases which are common to non-indigenous people, but to which their bodies have no immunity.

At first the Portuguese colony grew slowly. From 1580 to 1640 the population was only about 50,000 apart from the million or so indígenas. In 1700 there were some 750,000 non-indigenous people in Brazil. Early in the 19th century Humboldt computed there were about 920,000 whites, 1.96 million Africans, and 1.12 million indígenas and people of mixed Portuguese and indigenous origin (mestiços): after three centuries of occupation a total of only four million, and over twice as many Africans as there were whites.

As the sugar industry declined in the late 17th century in the face of competition from British, French and Dutch Caribbean colonies, gold was discovered inland in 1695 in Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso and other areas. Despite the lack of communications, prospectors rushed in from all over Europe. Shortly afterwards, diamonds were found in the Serra do Frio. The economy was largely driven by gold until the 1760s and a revival of world demand for sugar in the second half of the 18th century. Thereafter, there was diversification into other crops such as cacao, rice, cotton and coffee, all of which were produced for export by large numbers of slaves.

Roosevelt’s research, together with that being undertaken by ethno-biologists like Wade Davis, anthropologists like Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff and Mesoamerica archaeologists and epigraphers like Linda Schele, began to change radically once widely-accepted ideas of the pre-Columbian Americans. Gone is a notion based on an analysis of their technology and concluding that they were prehistoric, primitive peoples, instead is an analysis based on their rich societal structure, speculative philosophy and the mythology which sustained it. We now see the first Americans as a divergent range of peoples who arrived in the Americas at varying times and probably from various locations. Between them they shared a common philosophical world-map – an idea of being – which was radically different from our own Greco-Roman idea and which was rooted in shamanism. In philosophical terms shamanism assumes that being is as vital a component of reality as energy and matter; and like those two it is shared. In other words the basic stuff of the Universe is threefold – matter (energy), space and time (position) and the perception of those two (being); on which they both depend for their existence. The essence of being can be directly apprehended behind the mind by seers or shaman (Portuguese pajé). In most first American societies it was shaman – together with powerful civic leaders (Portuguese cacique) who guided tribal societies; be they Mayan or Ticuna.

Little is known of these people largely because of the colonial ideas that were handed down to Western archaeologists by the Spanish and Portuguese, who burned and plundered many of the artefacts and books of the first Americans. The Amazonian peoples were decimated by the Portuguese slave trade long before their knowledge could be shared; and as most of their treasures were made from perishable materials like feather, bark and reed, the products of their labour and their knowledge rotted into the forest floor. What we know is scant and trivial. The earliest people lived mainly on the flood plains of the great rivers and caught fish and manatee using spears thrown from the shore, or from dugout canoes. Besides fishing, these people also cultivated manioc and other plants found on the forest floor. They kept turtles in corrals at the river’s edge, for eating and also for making tools and other artefacts from their shells.

The major handicap to archaeological study of tropical cultures is that most material remains deteriorate rapidly in the warm, humid climate. Since the majority of cultural output from Brazil was in perishable materials such as feathers, wood, baskets, and woven textiles, little has survived for modern analysis. Nevertheless various artefacts have been discovered from all around the country, showing considerable artistic and technical skill. The pottery produced by the early peoples was of a high standard. Early ceramics have been found on Marajó island at the mouth of the Amazon. The Annatuba culture lived here in small villages by the river. Most of their ceramics found are round bowls and jars, including huge funeral urns, which have been dated with increasing antiquity; the earliest from around 980 BC. Textile production was done mainly with hand-twisted fibres, using both cotton and bast. Objects found in Rio Grande do Sul, dating from AD 550 or earlier, included twined bags, nets and ropes. Most of the textiles found throughout Brazil were simple everyday items, such as hammocks and straps, with little decoration.

The most widespread linguistic grouping in Brazil at the time of the European conquest was the Tupi-Guarani. These people originated from the Atlantic coast around AD 500-700. By the 1500s the Tupi-Guarani, who often moved from place to place could be found from north of the Amazon south to Rio de la Plata, and west into Paraguay and Bolivia; they were probably the first Americans the Portuguese encountered

Another large, organized group of people were the Tupinambá. They lived on the coast, from the mouth of the Amazon south to São Paulo state. The Tupinambá lived by cultivating crops, such as manioc, sweet potato, yams, as well as cotton, gourds and tobacco. They lived in villages of four to eight large, rectangular, thatched houses, each containing up to 30 families. They usually built their villages on an elevation to catch the breeze, and moved to new sites every five years or so.

By about 100-200 BC, people throughout Brazil were settled in structured, fixed communities by the coasts and rivers, living increasingly by farming instead of nomadic hunting and gathering. The subsequent population growth spread communities further along river courses and into seasonally flooded savannah lands.

The 1964 coup was a turning point in Brazilian political history. This time the armed forces did not return to barracks as they had before. Opposition leaders were arrested, the press censored, labour unions purged of anyone seen as left wing, and the secret police were given wide powers. The political parties were outlawed and replaced by two officially approved parties: the government Aliança Renovadora Nacional (ARENA) and the opposition Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (MDB). Congress, consisting only of members of these two parties, approved a succession of military presidents nominated by the armed forces. A new constitution, introduced in 1967, gave the president broad powers over the states and over Congress. The worst period of repression occurred between 1968 and 1973 with a wave of urban guerrilla warfare. Around this time, the military government’s economic adjustment programme paid dividends and the economy began to grow, making life easier for the middle classes and reducing any potential support for guerrilla groups. In 1968-1974 the economy grew at over 10% a year, which became known as the Brazilian ‘economic miracle’. This spectacular growth, achieved because of the authoritarian nature of the regime, masked a widening gulf between the rich and poor, with the blacks and mulattos, always at the bottom in Brazilian society, suffering the most. Edwin Williamson (The Penguin History of Latin America) quotes statistics showing that in 1960 the richest 10% of the population received 40% of the national income; by 1980 they received 51%, while the poorest 50% received only 13%. In the shanty towns, or favelas, which had mushroomed around all the large cities, but especially São Paulo, disease, malnutrition and high mortality rates were prevalent and their citizens battled constantly in appalling housing lacking sewerage, running water and electricity.

By 1973 some military officers and their civilian advisors had become alarmed at the rising level of opposition. Arguing that repression alone would merely lead to further opposition and even to attempted revolution, they pressed for ‘decompression’: policies to relax the repression while remaining in power. The attempt to carry out this policy by legalizing political parties, permitting freer trade unions and strikes and reducing censorship, gave greater space for the opposition to demand an end to military rule. Attempts to introduce elections to Congress which were less controlled faced the same obstacle: they tended to result in victories for candidates who favoured civilian rule.

The monarchy did not long survive the end of slavery. The São Paulo coffee producers resented abolition and resented their under-representation in the structures of power nationwide, while being called upon to provide the lion’s share of the treasury’s revenues. The republican movement started in the early 1870s in cities all over Brazil, but grew strongest in São Paulo. It gradually attracted the support of the military, who also felt under-represented in government, and on 15 November 1889 a bloodless military coup d’état deposed the monarchy and instituted a federal system. The constitution of the new republic established 20 states with wide powers of self-government, a directly elected president of a national government with a senate and a chamber of deputies. Suffrage was introduced for literate adult males (about 3% of the population) and the church and state were separated. Although the birth of the republic was bloodless, there were pockets of resistance in rural areas such as the northeast, where the sugar estates were in recession. In the 1890s O Conselheiro led tens of thousands of followers against the secular republic at Canudos, nearly all of whom were eventually killed by government troops. In 1911 there was another rebellion in the southern states of Paraná and Santa Catarina, led by a Catholic visionary in defence of the monarchy. The Contestado movement lasted until 1915, when it too was destroyed by the military.

Brazilian politics were now dominated by an alliance known as café con leite (coffee with milk), of the coffee growers of São Paulo and the cattle ranchers of Minas Gerais, occasionally challenged by Rio Grande do Sul, with periodic involvement of the military. The first two presidents of the republic were military: Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca (1889-1891) and Marshal Floriano Peixoto (1891-1894). In some ways the military took the place of the Crown in mediating between the states’ oligarchies, but its interventions were always unconstitutional and therefore gave rise to political instability. By the 1920s tensions between São Paulo and Minas Gerais had come out into the open with the cattle ranchers resenting the way in which the coffee growers used their position to keep the price of coffee artificially high at a time when there was an oversupply. Other social groups also became restive and unsuccessful coup attempts were launched by junior army officers in 1922, 1924 and 1926.

Yet another constitution was drafted by a constituent assembly in 1946, this one based on the liberal principles of the 1891 constitution but including the labour code and the social legislation of the Estado Nôvo. Industrialization through state planning was retained, the foreign-owned railways were nationalized, hydroelectric power was developed, but deflation was necessary to bring down spiralling prices. The Communist Party was banned again in 1947. Meanwhile Vargas was elected Senator for Rio Grande do Sul, his home state, and kept active in politics, eventually being elected as candidate for the PSD and PTB alliance in the 1950 presidential elections. Although it was his third presidency, it was only his first by direct elections.

The third Vargas presidency was beset by the problems of fulfilling populist election promises while grappling with debt and inflation. Rapid industrialization required levels of investment which could only be raised abroad, but the nationalists were opposed to foreign investment. He failed to reconcile the demands of the USA and the nationalists, particularly with regards to oil and energy, and he failed to control inflation and stabilize the economy. There were rumours of corruption, and after the president’s bodyguard was implicated in a plot to kill a journalist, which went wrong and another man was shot, the army issued him with another ultimatum to resign or be ousted. Instead, on 24 August 1954, Vargas shot himself, leaving a suicide note denouncing traitors at home and capitalists abroad.

The Wall Street crash led to a sudden decline in demand for coffee and the São Paulo elite saw its hegemony wiped out. The elections of 1930 saw another win for the São Paulo candidate, but the results were disputed by a coalition of opposition forces. After several months of tension and violence, the army intervened, deposed the outgoing president and installed the alternative candidate of Rio Grande do Sul, Getúlio Vargas, a wealthy rancher, as provisional president. Vargas in fact held office until 1954, with only one break in 1945-1950. His main aim, when he took office, was to redress the balance of power away from São Paulo and in favour of his own state. However, the effects of his reforms were more far-reaching. He governed by decree, replacing all state governors with ‘interventors’ who reduced the state militias, and reorganized the system of patronage within the states in favour of his own. São Paulo naturally resisted and there was a rebellion in 1932, but it was soon put down by federal troops, effectively wiping out the threat to Vargas’ authority. In 1934 a constituent assembly drew up a new constitution that reduced the power of the states and gave more power to the president. The assembly then elected Vargas as president for a four-year term.

With the decline of traditional oligarchic blocs came the rise of political parties. The first to fill the vacuum were the fascists and the communists, who frequently took to street violence against each other. The fascists, called Integralists, were founded by Plínio Salgado in 1932. The Aliança Libertadora Nacional (ALN), a popular front including socialists and radical liberals, was founded by the Brazilian Communist Party in 1935. The ALN attempted to gain power by infiltrating the junior ranks of the army and encouraging rebellions, but Vargas clamped down on the movement, imprisoning its leaders. The fascists aimed to take power in 1938, the year elections were due, at which Vargas was not eligible to stand. However, in October 1937, Vargas declared a state of siege against an alleged communist plot and suspended the constitution which had prevented him being re-elected. Instead, he proclaimed a new constitution and a new state, Estado Nôvo. The fascists tried to oust him but failed, leaving Vargas with no effective opposition whatsoever.

The Estado Nôvo was also a response to an economic crisis, brought on by a fall in coffee prices, rising imports, a resulting deficit in the balance of payments, a high level of debt and soaring inflation. Vargas assumed dictatorial powers to deal with the economic crisis, censoring the press, banning political parties, emasculating trade unions and allowing the police unfettered powers. There followed a transition from export-led growth to import substitution and industrialization with heavy state intervention. Agricultural resources were channelled into industry and the government became involved in mining, oil, steel, electricity, chemicals, motor vehicles and light aircraft. The military were allowed free rein to develop their own armaments industry. As war approached in Europe, Vargas hedged his bets with both Nazi Germany and the USA, to see who would provide the greatest assistance for Brazil’s industrialization. It turned out to be the USA, and in return for allowing US military bases to be built in northern Brazil he secured loans, technical assistance and other investments for a massive steel mill at Volta Redonda and infrastructure projects. Brazil did not declare war on Germany until 1944, but it was the only Latin American country to send troops to join the allies, with a force of 25,000 men going to Italy.

In mid-2004 Lula published an impressive proposed bill on Agrarian Reform which promised far more than any Brazilian government ever has: 400,000 families are to be settled via expropriation, 200,000 to be settled on land purchased by a Credito Fundiário small loans bank, designed to sell to small farmers at subsidized interest rates. He also launched a Fome Zero, or ‘no hunger’ programme, designed to give all poor Brazilians enough to eat.

In 1985 Tancredo Neves was elected as the first civilian president for 21 years. Before he could take office he fell ill and died. His vice-president José Sarney became president at a time of economic crisis, with inflation at 300%. Sarney introduced the Cruzado Plan in 1986, freezing prices and wages, but inflation exploded when the freeze was lifted.

A new constitution brought direct presidential elections in November 1989. After two rounds of voting Fernando Collor de Melo, of the small Partido da Reconstrução Nacional, won 53% of the vote to narrowly defeat his left-wing rival, Luís Inácio da Silva (popularly known as Lula). Collor launched controversial economic reforms, including opening the economy to imports, privatisation and a freeze on savings and bank accounts. The policies failed and by 1991 inflation reached 1500% and foreign debt payments were suspended.

As in the USA, Brazilian presidents cannot run for a third term. Four front-runners emerged in the 2002 elections. Taking an early commanding lead in the opinion polls was Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, best known as Lula, who was making his fourth bid for the presidency. With a refurbished image, a new suit, moderated policies and a millionaire running mate, the veteran firebrand, gained support from all classes.

Against a backdrop of global crises, the real again lost some 50% of its value in less than a year. Foreign investors were concerned about repeated budget deficits, and the prospect that a more left-wing government might default on debts. In August 2002, the IMF again came to the rescue, this time with a record US$30-billion loan, subject to tough conditions. On 27 October 2002 Lula won a convincing victory against government-backed José Serra. The new president – once shoe-shine boy, ex-leader of the Metal Workers’ Union and head of the Workers’ Party – set out to lead the first left-wing government in Brazil for 40 years.

The architect of the real plan was finance minister Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Three decades earlier he had been a high-profile leftist and opponent of military rule, forced into exile after the 1964 military coup. The success of the real plan led to his election as president in October 1994. After trailing Lula of the Workers Party (PT), Cardoso gained such popularity that he won the election in the first round of voting. However, his alliance of the Brazilian Social Democrat Party (PSDB), the Liberal Front (PFL) and the Labour Party (PTB) failed to gain a majority in either house of Congress. This severely hampered plans to reform the tax and social security systems and the civil service. The government was also criticized for its slowness in addressing social problems. Such problems ranged from the need for land reform and violence associated with landlessness, to the slave-like working conditions in agricultural areas and the human rights of the indígenas and of street children in large cities.

Towards the end of 1997 the financial crisis in Asia sapped investor confidence throughout the world, and threatened Brazil’s currency and economic stability. The failure to cut public spending had swollen the budget deficit and the real was exposed to speculation. Cardoso was obliged to take actions to prevent an upsurge in inflation and devaluation of the currency, but at the cost of slowing down economic growth. Crisis was avoided and inflation remained in single figures, in contrast to the hyperinflation of earlier periods.

There are various forest types associated with and largely unique to the Amazon rivers. All the Amazonian forests are highly species rich. It has been estimated that 4 sq km of forest can harbour some 1200 vascular plants, 600 species of tree, and 120 woody plants. Gallery forests are those which are found along the banks of rivers; and which are subject to rapid erosion when the river changes course. These forests tend to grow on nutritionally rich soil and are often high in fruiting plants. Várzea is a biodiverse seasonally flooded forest found along the banks of the whitewater rivers; it is very nutritionally rich as a consequence of the huge amount of silt and nutrients washed out of the mountains and trapped by the massive buttress-rooted trees. It can be flooded for as much as seven months of the year and is found throughout the Amazon system. One of the most common várzea trees, the Pará rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis), is the source of latex. The Brazilian rubber industry foundered in the 19th century when seeds of this tree were smuggled to Asia by the British and grown in vast rubber plantations, which flourished in the absence of Amazonian pest species. Another varzea tree is camu-camu, whose juice has by far the highest vitamin C content of any fruit in the world; despite claims made for various Australian berries. Varzea forests are good places to spot waterbirds such as the Amazon’s many heron, egret, ibis, duck, cormorant and stork species, at least five kingfisher species, numerous raptors like black-collared hawks and endemic birds like hoatzin. These are generally found along waterways where it feeds on leaves and fruit. The newly hatched chicks of this primitive bird have claws at the tip of each wing which enable them to crawl around in the foliage. Varzea is frequently visited by parrots and macaws and by primates, who are all after seasonal fruit and nuts.

Igapó forests are seasonally inundated forests found on blackwater rivers. They grow in sandy soil, which lies as beautiful exposed beaches in the dry. The largest areas of igapó are found in the Rio Negro system, which joins the Amazon in Manaus. Despite being flooded for up to seven months of the year to a possible depth of 15 m, palms dominate the igapó, interspersed with large hardwood trees like kapok. During the wet season, these flooded forests are inhabited by turtles and small fish, and the predators that feed upon them – like giant otters and various species of caiman, which can be heard calling to each other at dawn. Bird and primate life is rich with similar families to várzea, though with less diversity as igapó has fewer fruiting trees.

The Amazon basin, which is made-up of myriad different rivers; more than four of which are by water volume the largest rivers in the world, contains the greatest area of tropical rainforest in the world, 6,000,000 sq km, 60% of which is located in Brazil. It is home to 20% of the world’s plant and bird species; perhaps 10% of mammal species; an inestimable number of insects and perhaps some 2000 species of fish inhabiting the 1000 tributaries of the Amazon. When in flood the great river inundates the forest for a short period in its upper reaches to create a unique habitat called várzea; in the lower reaches this flooding may last for four to seven months forming igapó swamp forest.

The Atlantic rainforest used to cover 2,600,000 sq km in a coastal strip 160 km wide and 4200 km long but now covers less than 5% of that. As the forest ranges from sea level to over 2000 m and has been isolated biologically from the Amazon and Andes, it is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world; so much so; that it is one of Conservation International’s designated world biodiversity hotspots: see http://www.hotspots.com, for further details. There are 21 different primate species found here (compared to, for example Costa Rica’s four). Seventeen of these are endemic to the Mata Atlântica, and of these, 13 species including the golden lion tamarin, are endangered. South America’s largest primate, the woolly spider monkey, known locally as muriqui, was hunted close to extinction by European colonists who first settled along this coastal zone and subsequently by Brazilian peasant farmers. But the monkey still clings on in private reserves like REGUA in Rio de Janeiro state and the Parque Nacional Caparaó in Minas Gerais.

The sertão is a region which lies in the dry hinterlands of northeastern Brazil; ecologically it is made up principally of caatinga. This is South America’s least scientifically studied biome and is completely unique to Brazil. The caatinga is made up of xeric desert-adapted plants – small, thorny deciduous trees, cacti, succulent plants, and fire-adapted grassland savannahs. There are many unique flowering plants that burst into brilliant bloom in the wet. The biome has two seasons: winter (May-November) when it is very hot and dry, and the summer (January-April) when it is very hot and wet. During the dry winter periods trees are bare and their roots begin to protrude through the surface of the stony soil which can reach temperatures of up to 60°C. When the rains begin in January, the bleak, desert-like landscape of the caatinga is transformed in an exuberance of green and bright flowers; the rivers start to fill up and birds begin to sing in the trees.

The Amazon river is the greatest in the world in area of drainage, about 7,000,000 sq km, and in volume of discharge into the sea averaging 180,000 cu m per second (or 170 billion gallons per hour), 10 times that of the Mississippi, and more than all the rivers of Europe put together. Such is the flow that the salinity of the Atlantic Ocean is affected for 250 km out from the river delta. It is 6400 km long (marginally shorter than the Nile) from its sources in the Andes of Peru, and still has over 3000 km to go through Brazil when it leaves Leticia on the Colombia/Brazil border, yet with only a fall of 80 m to sea level. Unlike most major world rivers, the basin is reduced in width near its mouth, indeed hills come down to the river near Monte Alegre only 200 km from the delta. Some 200 km above this at Óbidos, the river is over 75 m deep, that is the bottom is well below sea level. This reflects the more recent geological history of the basin which until the latter part of the Tertiary Period (say 25 million years ago) was connected to the Pacific and drained through what is now Ecuador. With the uplift of the Andes, this route was closed off, and a huge inland sea was formed, helped by a downward folding of the older rocks (some geologists believe there was also significant rifting of the strata) to create a huge geosyncline. Eventually the water broke through the crystalline rocks to the east and made the new connection to the Atlantic. Deep layers of sediment were laid down and have been added to ever since, with today’s heavy tropical rains continuing to erode the surrounding mountains. This gives the largest, more or less, level area in Brazil, but it is so heavily forested and the soils so continually leached by the climate, with vast expanses frequently under floodwaters, that the potential for agriculture is strictly limited.

South of the Amazon basin is a large area of undulating highlands, a dry plateau mostly between 200 m and 800 m. These are ancient rocks, back as far as Pre-Cambrian crystallines. They produce poor soils but sufficient to provide the grasslands or cerrado of the Mato Grosso, Goiás, western Paraná and adjacent areas, widely used for ranching, though now increasingly found suitable for soya bean production, one of Brazil’s foremost exports.

Although Brazil is dominated by the vast river basins of the Amazon and the Paraná which account for about three-fifths of the country, not much of it is ‘lowlands’. Ancient rock structures, some of the oldest in the world, underlie much of the area creating resistant plateaux and a rounded hilly landscape. These ancient Pre-Cambrian rocks culminate in the Guiana highlands to the north and the crystalline ranges which run close to the coastline all the way from near the Amazon to the Uruguayan frontier.

Highlands follow the coastline, only a short distance inland, for 3000 km. The ancient crystalline/granite ridges, known as serras, stretch from Porto Alegre in the south to near Belém in the north, just short of the Amazon estuary. Long stretches are in the form of a single or stepped escarpment, abrupt in the east and sloping more gently inland to the west. They are not high in South American terms – the highest point, Pico da Bandeira is only 2890 m – but it is no more than 120 km from the ocean near Vitória. The narrowness of the coastal strip has had a profound effect on the history of settlement. Until comparatively recent times, the lack of natural access to the hinterland confined virtually all economic activity to this area, and today most of the major cities of Brazil and 80% of the population are on or near the coast.

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