Sudeste

The Sudeste — São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, Brazil's urban economic engine. It grew from the bandeirante slave-raiders of São Paulo and the 18th-century gold of Minas into the coffee economy whose wealth, from the 1870s, drew mass Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Lebanese immigration — the layered ancestry that distinguishes it from the Afro-Portuguese Nordeste. Today São Paulo is South America's financial and industrial capital while Rio supplies the national self-image — samba, Carnival, the beaches under Christ the Redeemer — and together the region produces the bulk of Brazil's GDP.

• Existed: 1554 CE – present
• Type: Entity