Norte

The Norte — the vast Amazon basin. Settled late from Belém (1616) and run through Jesuit and then Pombaline Amazon policy, it boomed on wild rubber from the 1880s — the wealth that raised Manaus's jungle opera house — before Asian plantations undercut it. Its defining difference is ecological and ethnic: an indigenous and caboclo river society living by the forest and its floods (açaí, the rubber-tapper legacy of Chico Mendes) rather than the Atlantic plantation. Home to most of Brazil's surviving Indigenous peoples and the world's largest rainforest, it is now the front line of the global deforestation struggle.

• Existed: 1616 CE – present
• Type: Entity