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Brasil1--part: Center-West2 Region;3 North4 Region--part: Rondônia

How is the land laid out?

This area, with two exceptions, is a large portion of Brasil's Central Highlands. Most of it is rolling plain with low hills, but some of Goiás is rugged mountains, though not much higher than 1000 meters.

One of the two exceptions is northwest Rondônia which, along the Madeira River,5 is part of the Amazon lowlands. The other straddles the Mato Grosso/ Mato Grosso do Sul6 boundary, in the west of both states. This is the Patanal, a marshy extension of Bolivia's and western Paraguay's Gran7 Chaco plain.

Rondônia, northern Mato Grosso and northwest Goiás are drained by tributaries of the Amazon,8 including the Maderia, the Tapajós and the Xingu. The rest of northern Goiás is within the Tocantins9 system. The waters of southern Goiás and eastern Mato Grosso do Sul head to the Paraná,10 which forms the east bound of Mato Grosso do Sul. The Patanal includes the Paraguai11 and its feeds.

UNESCO honors several areas as World Heritage Sites: the Cerrado Protected Areas includes two units, one about 80 kilometers from the center of Mineiros; and the Pantanal Conservation Area, a tourist attractionsd, with four units, one being near Corumbá.

Map

map of the Center-West Region and Rondônia, Brasil (Brazil), showing state borders and selected rivers and reservoirs

Who lives there?

This area shares Portuguese and Roman Catholic Christianity with the rest of Brazil.

Brasília, the national capital, and Goiânia, the state capital of Goiás, both have more than a million residents. Other cities of note are Cuiabá, Mineiros, Goiâs, Corumbá and Campo Grande.

Who was there before?

So little was recorded at early Luzo-Brazilian contact, and so much change has been wrought since, that the best way to reconstruct the pre-Columbian past is to generalize from the present day distribution of indiginous languages, but this is admittedly error prone.

Major languages groups12 represented by at least two languages here are Tupi, Macro-Ge, Arawakan--the Maipuran group specifically, and Carib.13 Minor groups here are the Chapacura-Wanham and Nambiquaran. Besides that are two languages belonging to groups not otherwise represented, plus an isolate and several unclassified languages.

Portuguese speakers began arriving in the 17th century, perhaps earlier, and indiginous populations dwindled from disease, slavery and exploitation in the rubber industry. Most indiginous people adopted Roman Catholic Christianity, and many switched their family language to Portuguese.

Around the Area

north of northeastern Mato Grosso
north of Goiás
northeast of Goiás
southeast of Goiás and of northern Mato Grosso do Sul
southeast of southern Mato Grosso do Sul
southwest of Mato Grosso do Sul
southwest of Rondônia and Mato Grosso
northwest

Footnotes

1. Officially Brasil since the late 19th century; still Brazil in English.
2. Centro-Oeste in Portuguese.
3. The region consists of the Federal District and the states of Goiás, Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul.
4. Norte in Portuguese.
5. The third or fourth longest river in South America.
6. 'Do sul' translates as southern from Portuguese.
7. Translates from Spanish as big.
8. Amazonas in Portuguese or Spanish. That river is South America's longest and the world's second longest.
9. The Pará-Tocantins is South America's sixth or seventh longest river.
10. Paraná is the world's ninth longest river, and South America's second longest.
11. Paraguay in Spanish and English. It is South America's eighth longest river.
12. Joseph Greenberg would classify all pre-Columbian language groups together as Amerindian.
13. Macro-Ge, Carib and Panoan are sometimes grouped into a Ge-Pano-Carib group.