Amazonas (, ; ) is a state of Brazil, located in the North Region in the north-western corner of the country. It is the largest Brazilian state by area and the ninth-largest country subdivision in the world with an area of 1,570,745.7 square kilometers. It is the largest country subdivision in South America, being greater than the areas of Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay combined. Neighbouring states are (from the north clockwise) Roraima, Pará, Mato Grosso, Rondônia, and Acre. It also borders the nations of Peru, Colombia and Venezuela. This includes the Departments of Amazonas, Vaupés and Guainía in Colombia, as well as the Amazonas state in Venezuela, and the Loreto Region in Peru.
Amazonas is named after the Amazon River, and was formerly part of the Spanish Empire's Viceroyalty of Peru, a region called Spanish Guyana. It was settled by the Portuguese moving northwest from Brazil in the early 18th century and incorporated into the Portuguese Empire after the Treaty of Madrid in 1750. It became a state under the First Brazilian Republic in 1889.
Most of the state is tropical jungle; cities are clustered along navigable waterways and are accessible only by boat or plane. It is divided into 62 municipalities and the capital and largest city is Manaus, a modern city of 2.1 million inhabitants in the middle of the jungle on the Amazon River, 1,500 km upstream from the Atlantic Ocean. Nearly half the state's population lives in the city; the other large cities, Parintins, Manacapuru, Itacoatiara, Tefé, and Coari are also along the Amazon River in the eastern half of the state.
Etymology The name was originally given to the Amazon River that runs through the state by the Spaniard Francisco de Orellana in 1541. Claiming that he came across a warlike tribe of indigenous people of whom the women fought alongside the men, de Orellana likened them to the Amazons of Greek mythology, and hence named the river Río de las Amazonas. Real Academia Hispano Americana de Ciencias, Artes y Letras
History
Administrative evolution
Amazonas was originally the captaincy of São Jose do Rio Negro, then a District of Grão-Pará, which became a province and finally a state of Brazil. 1616 – Captaincy of Maranhão begins westward expansion 1751 – Maranhão reconstituted as state of Grão-Pará e Maranhão 1755 – Captaincy of Rio Negro split off 1757 – Captaincy of Rio Negro rejoined 1772 – Grão-Pará e Rio Negro split from Grão-Pará e Maranhão. 1775 – Captaincy of Grão-Pará of state of Brazil. 1821 – Province of Pará 1822 – Pará province of independent Brazil. 1832 – Creation of Judicial District of the Upper Amazonas, under Pará. 1850 – Province of Amazonas split from Pará 1889 – State of Amazonas
Capital 1755 – Village of São José do Javari; it became the vila Maryua 1758 – Maryua is elevated to a town and called Barcelos 1788–1799 – Capital moved to Barra do Rio Negro; 1799–1808 – The capital was again in Barcelos 1808 – Barra do Rio Negro the capital, renamed Manaus in 1832
Rise of the rainforest
At one time the Amazon River flowed westward, perhaps as part of a proto-Congo (Zaïre) river system from the interior of present-day Africa when the continents were joined as part of western Gondwana. Fifteen million years ago, the Andes were formed by the collision of the South American Plate with the Nazca Plate (eastern Pacific oceanic) plate. The rise of the Andes and the linkage of the Brazilian and Guyana bedrock shields, blocked the river and caused the Amazon to become a vast inland sea. Gradually this inland sea became a massive swampy, freshwater lake and the marine inhabitants adapted to life in freshwater. For example, over 20 species of stingray, most closely related to those found in the Pacific Ocean, can be found today in the fresh waters of the Amazon.
About ten million years ago, waters worked through the sandstone to the west and the Amazon began to flow eastward. At this time the Amazon rainforest was born. During the Ice Age, sea levels dropped and the great Amazon lake rapidly drained and became a river. Three million years later, the ocean level receded enough to expose the Central American isthmus and allow mass migration of mammal species between the Americas.
The Ice Ages caused tropical rainforest around the world to retreat. Although debated, it is believed that much of the Amazon reverted to savanna and montane forest. Savanna divided patches of rainforest into "islands" and separated existing species for periods long enough to allow genetic differentiation. A similar rainforest retreat took place in Africa, where Delta core samples suggest that even the mighty Congo watershed was void of rainforest at this time. When the ice ages ended, the forest was again joined, and the species that were once one, had diverged significantly enough to be designated as separate species, adding to the tremendous diversity of the region. About 6,000 years ago, sea levels rose about 130 meters, once again causing the river to be inundated like a long, giant freshwater lake.
Native peoples
The pre-Columbian Amazonas was inhabited by seminomadic peoples whose livelihood mixed occasional agriculture with a fishing and hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Because of Christopher Columbus' misunderstanding of the continent at which he had arrived, the native population were and are denominated "índios" by the Portuguese. Approximately two thousand Indian tribes lived in the region in the sixteenth century, perhaps amounting to some millions of people, but phenomena such as disease and assimilation to Brazilian culture caused their numbers to fall to approximately three hundred thousand, and two hundred tribes, by the end of the twentieth century. Certain uncontacted tribes still exist in the region.
Colonial conflicts In the colonial time, the territory which today belongs to the State of Amazonas, was a combination of treaties, expeditions, evangelism and military occupations. Scarce but recorded claims and indigenous uprisings in the region, were initially made by the Spanish Empire through the Treaty of Tordesillas and after the Portuguese Empire by the First Treaty of San Ildefonso. The State also includes territory from failed attempts at colonization by the European powers, such as England and the Dutch empire.
The first Spanish expedition was by Francisco de Orellana in conjunction with Catholic priest Gaspar de Carvajal, who documented the expedition. He reported a conflict against indigenous women which led to the current name of the river, and then to the current name of the region and the state (Amazonas in English: Amazons). The second Spanish expedition was by Pedro de Ursúa, intending to prove the previous expedition, but resulted in the Spanish Kingdom dropping the attempt to colonize the region.
After the unification of the Iberian kingdoms, Portugal launched an expedition on the river [but in reverse from Francisco de Orellana, at the mouth of the river to the site of the present-day city of Quito, capital of Ecuador], with the intention of attaching Spanish lands (comprising the current territory of the Brazilian Amazon) to the Portuguese Kingdom. After the dissolution of the Iberian Union, Portuguese and Spanish possessions in the region were undefined, resulting in internal conflicts in the region between Portugal and Spain. The Portuguese Crown later asserted the principle of uti possidetis, with respect to the region. This was the first assertion of the principle from Roman law of uti possidetis, ita possideatis, (Latin, "who has possession, has dominion"), analogous to English common law "Squatters rights". Due account may have been taken of John Locke's labour theory of property.
Conflicting issues arose between what was granted by law in the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), and the subsequent reality of colonial expansion: the Spanish, eastward from the Pacific coastal plains (though restrained by the Andes), and the Portuguese, westward (aided by the waterways and lowlands of the mighty Amazon). The Treaty of Madrid (13 January 1750) – that determined the border between the Spanish possessions and southern Portuguese Brazil – had first enunciated the principle that new states, at the time of their creation shall have dominion over the lands that were settled as colonies. It implicitly opened the door to claims by prior possession in the vast lands of the north.
After the independence of Brazil in 1822, the current borders of the Amazonas State were still undefined – at that time being with Gran Colombia. The internal conflicts within that neighbour country resulted in the emergence of Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Panama. Brazil signed the Treaty Vásquez Cobo–Martins (1908) (with those countries) finally entitling those possessions in the north to Brazil. One region is marked by the geodesic line Apóporis-Tabatinga; and the other is the municipal area of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, on the Brazil-Colombia border.
Spanish conquistadors and Jesuits
By the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), the whole Amazon basin was in the area of the Spanish Crown. The mouth of a great river was explored by Spanish conquistador Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, who reached it in February 1500, with his cousin Diego de Lepe. He called the river Río Santa María de la Mar Dulce (River of Saint Mary of the Sweet Sea) on account of the large freshwater estuary extending into the sea at its mouth.
In 1541, Spanish conquistadores Gonzalo Pizarro and Francisco de Orellana, from Quito, Ecuador, crossed the Andes Mountains and explored the course of the river to the Atlantic Ocean. The indigenous people called this river the Conoris. The myth of women warriors on the river has spread in the accounts and books, without any popular scope, still making those regions to receive names of warriors of Greek mythology, the Amazons — among them the largest river in the region that became known as the Amazon River. Early publications, as was the style of the day, called the river after its European explorer, the Orellana.
Also in the 16th century, there were the expeditions of conquistadores Pedro de Ursúa and Lope de Aguirre in search of the legendary El Dorado, the Lost City of Gold (1559–1561) Spanish Jesuit missions were the first settlements upstream on the Amazon. As many as 30 missions were founded in Amazon territory, seven in Brazil, between 1638 and 1727. The municipality of Silves on an island of Lake Saracá is one of the oldest in the Amazon, originating in a Mercedarian Indian mission founded in 1663. By the early 18th century, they were destroyed by the Portuguese, depopulated by smallpox, or their indigenous residents taken away as slaves by Portuguese Bandeirantes. A few were taken over by Portuguese Carmelites. The destruction of the missions was the end of Spanish claims in western Amazonia. Only one is a populated place today, San Pablo, now the municipality of São Paulo de Olivença.
English, Dutch and French outposts Starting about 1580, without effective occupation, English, Dutch, French (and even some Irish) searching for so-called drogas do sertão (spices of the backlands) had established some outposts upstream of the mouth of the Amazon.
Portuguese usurpation
From at least the time of the Tordesillas Treaty in 1494 until the Treaty of Madrid in 1750, the region of the upper Amazon was part of the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru (Viceroyalty of New Granada after 1717). Everything north of the Amazon (Solimões) and west of the Nhamundá River (Yamundá, in Spanish), an affluent of the left bank of the Amazon that forms the boundary of Amazonas with Pará, was known as Spanish Guyana.