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Brazil
South America's giant, from the Amazon to the Atlantic
Brazil is the colossus of South America, filling nearly half the continent and bordering every country on it but two. It is a land of superlatives: the Amazon, the planet's largest rainforest and river by volume, with a coastline of more than seven thousand kilometers fringed with famous beaches, and megacities like Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro that pulse with industry, music, and football. With well over two hundred million people, Brazil is a continental nation in its own right, a melting pot of Indigenous, African, Portuguese, and immigrant cultures that gave the world samba, bossa nova, and Carnival.
The country's geography is anchored by two great systems: the Amazon Basin in the north, a vast lowland of rivers and tropical forest, and the Brazilian Highlands to the south and east, a tableland of savanna known as the cerrado that has become an agricultural powerhouse. The Pantanal, the world's largest tropical wetland, spreads across the southwest. Brazil's highest point, Pico da Neblina at 2,995 meters, rises on the Venezuelan border in the Guiana Highlands. The climate is overwhelmingly tropical, though the far south reaches subtropical cool.
Claimed by Portugal in 1500 and built on sugar, gold, and enslaved African labor, Brazil became independent in 1822 as an empire before turning republic in 1889. The capital moved inland to the purpose-built modernist city of Brasilia in 1960. Today Brazil is an industrial and agricultural giant and a leading voice among developing nations, even as it wrestles with deep inequality and the global stakes of protecting the Amazon. Its cultural exports, from football to film to music, give it an outsized presence on the world stage.