Nordeste

The Nordeste — Brazil's oldest colonial core, where Portugal first landed in 1500 and ruled from Salvador until 1763. Built on the sugar engenhos that made Brazil the world's first great plantation economy, worked by millions of enslaved Africans, it holds the country's deepest Afro-Brazilian culture — Candomblé, capoeira, forró and the roots of Carnival. What sets it apart is that richness set against want: the semi-arid sertão's recurring droughts and the wide gap with the industrial south have driven generations to migrate, making it at once Brazil's cultural cradle and its poorest macro-region — the emotional heartland of 'the other Brazil'.

• Existed: 1549 CE – present
• Type: Entity