Nordeste

Where Brazil began, and where the sugar and the slavery were heaviest. The northeast coast was the first part of the colony settled, and Portuguese planters built the Atlantic world's first great sugar economy there in the sixteenth century, importing enslaved Africans in numbers that made the region the demographic and cultural core of Black Brazil. Salvador was the colonial capital for over two centuries. Palmares, a quilombo of escaped slaves in the interior, held out for most of the seventeenth century against repeated expeditions before being destroyed in 1694, and its leader Zumbi is a national figure. The Dutch held Recife from 1630 to 1654 and left a mark on the architecture. Behind the coastal strip lies the sertao, a semi-arid interior where recurrent droughts have driven migration south for a century and produced the messianic movements and banditry recorded in Euclides da Cunha's account of Canudos. Candomble, capoeira, forro and much of Brazilian cuisine originate here. The region remains the poorest in the country. Olinda and Salvador's Pelourinho are World Heritage sites. The region covers nine states and around fifty-seven million people. Salvador has the largest Black population of any city outside Africa. The sertao's droughts recur roughly every decade. Fernando de Noronha, offshore, is a World Heritage site. Carnival in Recife and Olinda differs from Rio's and is older, with frevo and maracatu rather than samba schools. Fortaleza and Recife are the largest cities. Cashew and sugar remain major crops alongside irrigated fruit in the Sao Francisco valley.

• Existed: 1549 CE – present
• Type: Entity