Pará (, ; ) is a state of Brazil, located in northern Brazil and traversed by the lower Amazon River. It borders the Brazilian states of Amapá, Maranhão, Tocantins, Mato Grosso, Amazonas and Roraima. To the northwest are the borders of Guyana and Suriname, and to the northeast is the Atlantic Ocean. The capital and largest city is Belém, which is located at in the bay of Marajó, near the estuary of the Amazon river. The state, which is home to 4.1% of the Brazilian population, is responsible for 2.2% of the Brazilian GDP.
Pará is the most populous state of the North Region, with a population of over 8.6 million, being the ninth-most populous state in Brazil. It is the second-largest state of Brazil in area, at , second only to Amazonas upriver. Its most famous icons are the Amazon River and the Amazon rainforest. Pará produces rubber (extracted from rubber tree groves), cassava, açaí, pineapple, cocoa, black pepper, coconut, banana, tropical hardwoods such as mahogany, and minerals such as iron ore and bauxite. A new commodity crop is soy, cultivated in the region of Santarém.
Every October, Belém receives tens of thousands of tourists for the year's most important religious celebration: the procession of the Círio de Nazaré. Another important attraction of the capital is the Marajó-style ceramics, based on the vanished Marajoara culture, which developed on that very large island in the Amazon River.
Etymology The state's name is a toponym of the Tupi word pará – literally "sea", but sometimes used to refer to large rivers. The state was named after the river of the same name, the Pará River, one of the tributaries of the Amazon River.
History In 1500, the Spanish navigator Vicente Yáñez Pinzón was the first European to navigate the mouth of the Amazon River.BUENO, E. A viagem do descobrimento: a verdadeira história da expedição de Cabral. Rio de Janeiro. Objetiva. 1998. p. 132 (in Portuguese) On 26 August 1542, the Spaniard Francisco de Orellana reached the mouth of the Amazon River waterway, by river from Quito, Ecuador. On 28 October 1637, the Portuguese Pedro Teixeira left Belém and went to Quito: during the expedition, he placed a landmark in the confluence of the Napo and Aguarico, in the current border between Ecuador and Peru, to Portugal, and later to Brazil, getting the possession of most of the Amazon, including all of the current territory of Pará.
Prior to European Arrival
Archaeologists divide the ancient inhabitants of prehistory Brazil into groups according to their way of life and tools: hunter-gatherers of the coast and farmers. These groups were subsequently named by European settlers as "Indians". There are archaeological records proving the human presence in Brazil and the region of Santarém since 3000 BC.
Marajó people lived in farmers' huts or houses 3,500 years ago. These people knew ceramics, dyes, natural medicinal compounds; practiced slash-and-burn (to clear the land); and planted cassava. A reminder of their culture remains in Marajoara pottery, which has peculiar size and decoration. The period from 500 to 1300 was the height of the Marajoara culture.
Formation of Grão-Pará and Maranhão
The region of the Amazon valley, by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), was in possession of the Spanish Crown, the Portuguese expeditionaries, with the purpose of consolidating the region as Portuguese territory, founded the Fort of the Nativity (Forte do Presépio) in 1616, in Santa Maria de Belém do Grão-Pará (Saint Mary of Bethlehem of the Great Pará). The building was the first of the model on Amazon and the most significant in the Amazon territory until 1660. Despite the construction of fort, the occupation of territory was marked by early Dutch and English incursions in search of spices, hence the need of the Portuguese to fortify the area.
In the 17th century, the region, integrated into the captaincy of Maranhão, was prosperous with crops and livestock. In 1616 the captaincy of Grão-Pará was created, belonging to the Portuguese colonial state of Maranhão. In the same year the state of Grão-Pará and Maranhão transferred capital to Belém, forming and attaching the captaincy of Rio Negro in 1755 by creating the State of Grão-Pará and Rio Negro.
In 1751, with the expansion to the west, the colonial state of Grão-Pará, which besides the captaincy of Grão Pará would host the captaincy of São José do Rio Negro (today the State of Amazonas).
In 1823, the Pará decided to join the independent Brazil, which had been separated during the colonial period, reporting directly to Lisbon. However, political infighting continued. The most important of them, the Cabanagem (1835), decreed the independence of the province of Pará. This was, along with the Ragamuffin War, the only to lift the regency period when the power was taken. Cabanagem was the only revolt led by the popular strata.
Cabanagem
Cabanagem, a popular and social revolt during the Empire of Brazil, in the Amazon region, was influenced by the French Revolution. It was mainly due to extreme poverty, hunger and disease that devastated the Amazon at the beginning of the period, in the former province of Grão-Pará, which included the current Amazonian states of Pará, Amazonas, Amapá, Roraima and Rondônia. The revolt spread from 1835 until January 1840, due to the process of independence of Brazil (1822), which did not occur immediately in the province due to political irrelevance to which the region was relegated by Prince Regent Pedro I. After independence, the strong Portuguese influence remained stable, giving political irrelevance in this province to the Brazilian central government.
Indians, blacks, and mestizos (mostly poor class members), all named cabanos (cabins), teamed against the Regent Government and rebelled, to increase the importance of the region in Brazil's central government addressing the issue of poverty as one of the reasons. All lived in mud huts (hence the name of the revolt). At the bottom of the rebellion, there was a mobilization of the Brazilian Empire against the reactionary forces of the province of Grão-Pará in expelling the insurgents who wanted to keep the region as a Portuguese colony or territory independent. Many of the local leaders, who resented the lack of political participation in decisions of the centralizer of the Brazil government, contributed to the climate of dissatisfaction against the provincial government.
Rubber cycle and mineral extraction After the revolt, the local economy grew rapidly during the 19th century and early 20th century by exploitation of rubber, the latex, by extracting it. At this period the Amazon experienced two distinct economic cycles with the exploitation of the same raw material.
The intendant Antônio Lemos was the main character of the urban transformation that Belém experienced, which came to be known as Paris n'America (Paris in America), as a reference to the influence of the urbanization that Paris had experienced at the time, which served as the inspiration for Antônio Lemos.
During this period, for example, the city center was heavily lined with mango trees transported from India and development inspired by the model of Paris. With the decline of the two cycles of rubber (1870–1920 and 1940–1945), came a distressing economic stagnation, which stopped in the 1960s and 1970s, with the development of agricultural activities in the south of the state. From the decade of 1960s, but mainly in the 1970s, growth was accelerating with the exploitation of minerals mainly in the southeastern region of the state, as with iron extraction in the Serra dos Carajás and the Serra Pelada gold.
Geography Climate
All of Pará has a tropical climate, with most areas having a tropical monsoon climate (Köppen Am) with a drier season from July to November. The driest months are usually September and October with around , whilst February to April are the wettest with between . In the extreme south and east this grades into a tropical savanna climate (Aw) with less rainfall and a more pronounced dry season in the middle of the year, whilst parts of the north have a tropical rainforest climate (Köppen Af) with over in all months and an annual total of around .
Temperatures throughout Pará are uniformly hot with high relative humidity. Maxima are typically between , and minima around year-round. Vegetation
The Amazon represents over half of the planet's remaining rainforests and comprises the largest and most species-rich tracts of tropical rainforest in the world. Wet tropical forests are the most species-rich biome, and tropical forests in the Americas are consistently more species rich than the wet forests in Africa and Asia.Turner, I.M. 2001. The ecology of trees in the tropical rain forest. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. As the largest tract of tropical rainforest in the Americas, the Amazonian rainforests have unparalleled biodiversity. More than one-third of all species in the world live in the Amazon rainforest The largest biodiversity of the planet is present across the state of Pará.
Political subdivisions The state is divided into 144 municipalities.
The largest cities by population (2016) are: Belém 1,446,042 Ananindeua 510,834 Santarém 294,447 Marabá 272,172 Parauapebas 196,259 Castanhal 192,571 Abaetetuba 151,934 Cametá 132,515 Marituba 125,435 Bragança 122,881 Tucuruí 122,580 Barcarena 121,074 Altamira 111,938 Paragominas 108,547 Itaituba 98,485
Demographics According to the IBGE of 2022, there were 8,120,131 people residing in the state. The population density was . Urbanization: 75.2% (2006); Population growth: 2.5% (1991–2000); Houses: 1,754,000 (2006).Source: PNAD.
The last PNAD (National Research for Sample of Domiciles) census revealed the following numbers: 5,673,446 Brown (Multiracial) people (69.9%), 1,570,281 White people (19.3%), 793,621 Black people (9.8%), 69,180 Amerindian people (0.9%), 12,432 Asian people (0.2%).
Ethnic groups
Pará has attracted numerous Portuguese, Spanish, and Japanese immigrants. They have told their stories in a permanent space, the "Room Vicente Salles" of the "Memorial of the People", in Belém. The Portuguese colonists were followed by Spaniards fleeing wars and social unrest due to political disputes in the Iberian Peninsula. The Japanese have become established in agrarian communities, settling in towns such as Tomé-Açu.
Portuguese explorers and missionaries settled in the state in the 17th century. In January 1616, the Portuguese captain, Francisco Caldeira Castelo Branco began the occupation of the land, founding the Fort of the Nativity, nucleus of the future state capital. Portuguese religious missions were used to establish settlements between here and the Fort St. Louis of Maranhão. Most settlers sailed up the Amazon River as travel overland was extremely arduous. The Portuguese were the first to arrive in Pará, leaving contributions ranging from cuisine to architecture.
The first Japanese immigrants who settled in the Amazon left the Port of Kobe in Japan, on July 24, 1926, and reached the city of Tomé-Açu, on 22 September of that year, with stops in Rio de Janeiro and Belém.
The Japanese introduced crops such as jute and black pepper in the 1930s; jute was so successful that it drove a boom in the regional economy. In the 1970s, Japanese farmers introduced cultivation of Hawaiian papaya and melon, for which there is international demand. The third largest ethnic Japanese community in Brazil is in Pará, with about 13,000 inhabitants (surpassed only by settlements in the states of São Paulo and Paraná). They live mainly in the cities of Tomé-Açu, Santa Izabel do Pará, and Castanhal.