Half of Brazil is a worn plateau that once ran with lava
The Brazilian Highlands cover about 4.5 million square kilometres—roughly half the country—across eastern, southern, and central Brazil. Ancient basaltic floods built much of the terrain, yet today’s plateau is seismically quiet, its drama rewritten by long erosion into sediments and diverse biomes.
The highlands take in most of eastern, southern and central Brazil, around 4.5 million square kilometres, or roughly half the national territory. Most of the country's 203,062,512 people counted in the 2022 census live either on the plateau or on the thin coastal strip right beside it.
Much of the plateau began as ancient outpourings of basaltic lava, but that violent era ended long ago, and the region today has no earthquakes or active volcanoes. Erosion has done the later sculpting, grinding down former mountains and spreading thick layers of sediment. The result is a land of contrasts, with several biomes, very different climates, many soil types and thousands of plant and animal species.
Geographers usually split it into three parts. The Atlantic Plateau follows the entire eastern coast and includes several mountain ranges; it was once blanketed almost completely by the Atlantic Rainforest, among the most biodiverse places on earth, and just 7.3 percent of that forest survives. The Southern Plateau reaches inland across the south and south-centre, where lava partly capping older sedimentary rock weathers into the fertile soil nicknamed purple land. Atlantic Rainforest once covered large parts of it too, with araucaria highland forest and cerrado grassland across much of the remainder.
The Central Plateau fills the middle of the country and is built of both sedimentary and crystalline rock. About 85 percent of it was once cerrado, the savanna-like vegetation, and only a small share remains untouched. Various neighbouring or enclosed mountain ranges are also counted as part of the highlands. The loftiest summit is Pico da Bandeira in the Serra do Caparaó, at 2,891 metres.
Source: Brazilian Highlands
