Brazil

Brazil covers nearly half of South America and borders every country on the continent except Chile and Ecuador. The Amazon basin fills the north and west with the largest tropical rainforest on the planet. In the centre-west the cerrado, a wooded savannah, has become the country’s soybean and cattle belt, and beyond it the Pantanal floods each year into a vast wetland. Most Brazilians live near the Atlantic, on a long coast backed by the highlands of the south-east, where the big cities grew.

Hundreds of Indigenous peoples lived here when the Portuguese navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral landed in 1500. Sugar plantations in the north-east, and later the gold mines of Minas Gerais, were worked by enslaved Africans, and in 1888 Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. In 1822 Pedro, son of the Portuguese king, declared independence and made himself emperor. The monarchy fell in 1889, and military rule from 1964 to 1985 ended with a return to civilian government.

Portuguese, African and Indigenous roots, joined later by Italian, German, Japanese and Arab immigrants, produced samba and bossa nova, capoeira, Candomblé and the Carnival parades of Rio, Salvador and Recife. Football is played on every beach and patch of waste ground. Brazilian farms ship coffee, sugar, orange juice, soybeans, chicken and beef worldwide, and the country also produces iron ore and offshore oil, builds regional jets, and has run cars on sugar-cane ethanol since the 1970s.