Culture of Brazil and Portugal

Culture of Brazil

The Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvares Cabral arrived at present day Porto Seguro (Safe Harbor) in the state of Bahia on the Brazilian coast in April 1500 and named the new territory Ilha de Vera Cruz, Island of the True Cross, thinking he was on an island. A year later, Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci sailed to Brazil on a voyage commissioned by the Portuguese crown and returned home with a cargo of hard, reddish wood. The timber was alike to an East Indian kind called pau brasil, which was then well liked in Europe for producing chests of drawers and violin bows (Alvarez, 33).

Pau brasil (Brazil wood), the first merchandise to be exploited by the Portuguese in this new territory, is the source of the country's title, Brazil (Brown, 66).

Because of its size and diversity, Brazil is one of the country's most warranting of the title "land of contrasts." The homeland is often split up into five regions: Norte (North), Nordeste (Northeast), Centro-Oeste (Central-West), Sudeste (Southeast), and Su l (South). These partitions are utilized for administrative reasons for example the nationwide Brazilian census and they approximately correspond to geographic, demographic, financial, and heritage variety inside this rambling nation. The Northeast has the utmost percentage of persons of African fall; the South and Southeast are dwelling to the bulk of Brazilians of European and Japanese ancestry, while indigenous peoples reside mostly in the North and Central-West. Still, local migration and comprehensive miscegenation (racial inter-breeding) has made Brazil one of the most racially varied countries on earth.

 

Demography

The population of Brazil was about 170 million in 2000, the sixth largest in the world after China, India, the United States, Indonesia, and the Russian Federation. Despite its large community, Brazil's demographic density is somewhat low. Although there has been important community action into the central in latest decades, about 80 per hundred of all Brazilians still reside inside two century miles of the Atlantic coast.

Fertility rates have fallen spectacularly in Brazil in the last three or four decades of the twentieth 100 years, with the accomplished fertility rate at the turn of the twenty-first 100 years down to a mean of 2.1 young children per woman. Nevertheless, the community will extend to augment in the first 20 or 30 years of the twenty-first 100 years because of the nation's present youthful age structure.

The Brazilian population has three foremost components. Somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million Brazilian Indians inhabited Brazil when the Portuguese first reached in the early sixteenth century. Divided into numerous distinct heritages with distinct organizations, Brazilian Indians talked a large number of languages. Today they comprise only about .02 per hundred of the country's population. Their figures dropped quickly as an outcome of displacement, warfare and, most significantly, the introduction of European infections contrary to which they had no immunity. By 1955, only 120,000 Brazilian Indians were left and they were considered to be on the street to extinction.

This down high ground tendency has been turned ...