Brazilians often say they live in a continent rather than a country,
and that's an excusable exaggeration. The landmass is bigger than the
United States if you exclude Alaska; the journey from Recife in the
east to the western border with Peru is longer than that from London
to Moscow, and the distance between the northern and southern borders
is about the same as that between New York and Los Angeles. Brazil
has no mountains to compare with its Andean neighbours, but in every
other respect it has all the scenic - and cultural - variety you would
expect from so vast a country.
Despite the immense expanses of the interior, roughly two-thirds
of Brazil's population live on or near the coast; and well over
half live in cities - even in the Amazon. In Rio and São Paulo,
Brazil has two of the world's great metropolises, and nine other
cities have over a million inhabitants. Yet Brazil still thinks
of itself as a frontier country, and certainly the deeper into the
interior
you go, the thinner the population becomes. Nevertheless, the frontier
communities have expanded relentlessly during the last fifty years,
usually hand in hand with the planned expansion of the road network
into remote regions.
Other South Americans regard Brazilians as a race apart, and language
has a lot to do with it - Brazilians understand Spanish, just about,
but Spanish-speakers won't understand Portuguese. More importantly,
though, Brazilians look different. They're one of the most ethnically
diverse peoples in the world: in the extreme south, German and
Italian immigration has left distinctive European features; São Paulo
has the world's largest Japanese community outside Japan; there's
a large black population concentrated in Rio, Salvador and São
Luís; while the Indian influence is most visible in the people
of Amazônia and the Northeastern interior. |
