Rio de Janeiro may be named after a river that was never there
When Portuguese explorers reached Guanabara Bay on January 1, 1502, they may have called it a ria, an inlet of the sea, for January. Confusion with rio, meaning river, seems to have fixed the name Rio de Janeiro, now borne by one of Brazil's smallest but most crowded states.
The state is one of Brazil's 27 federative units, in the Southeast region, bordered by Minas Gerais, Espirito Santo and Sao Paulo and by the South Atlantic to the east and south. It covers 43,653 square kilometres, making it the smallest state in its region and among the smallest in the country, yet with more than 16 million people at the 2022 census it ranks third by population and first by density. It also has Brazil's third-longest coastline and is split into 92 municipalities. On the national flag it is represented by Mimosa, the beta star of the Southern Cross.
Economically it punches above its weight. Home to 8.2 percent of Brazilians, it generates 9.2 percent of national GDP, second only to Sao Paulo state. Its capital, the city of Rio de Janeiro, was capital of colonial Brazil from 1763, then, starting in 1815, seat of a brief union styled the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves, and of independent Brazil, first as a kingdom and then a republic, until 1960.
European settlement began in 1502. The French occupied the area between 1555 and 1567, trying to found a colony called France Antarctique, and to push them out Estacio de Sa established the city in March 1565.
Locals have two names, and the difference matters. Carioca, first recorded in 1502, is the older word, but in 1783 authorities made fluminense, from the Latin for river, the official term for the captaincy and later the province. For decades carioca stayed informal, and in the early republic it could even be a put-down for slum dwellers or federal bureaucrats. Only after the capital moved to Brasilia in 1960, and the city became the State of Guanabara, did carioca become official. Since Guanabara merged into Rio de Janeiro state in 1975, carioca describes city residents and fluminense the state as a whole.
Source: Rio de Janeiro (state)
