Belém was Portugal's first European Amazon foothold
Founded in 1616 and named for Bethlehem, Belém sits as the Brazilian Amazon's metropolis and "City of Mango Trees." It stayed outside early Brazil's core until later incorporation, yet its airport now links the estuary city across Brazil and South America.
Belém, in Brazilian Portuguese roughly be-LENG, began as Nossa Senhora de Belém do Grão-Pará under Portuguese rule. The 1616 foundation made it the first European colony on the Amazon, though political integration with Brazil came later than coastal captaincies to the south. River and Atlantic routes made the site a gateway for forest products and people.
In 1615 captain-general Francisco Caldeira Castelo Branco led an expedition from Bahia to block French, Dutch and English traders on the river. On 12 January 1616 he anchored in Guajará Bay, where the Pará and Guamá rivers meet, and built a straw-roofed wooden fort called Presépio, the nativity scene, now the Forte do Castelo. The settlement gained city status in 1655 and became capital when Pará split from Maranhão in 1772, yet joined Brazil only in 1775. Its fortunes swung from sugar to cattle, then rice, cotton and coffee, before southern Brazil outcompeted it.
Today the city exports aluminium, iron ore, Brazil nuts, pineapples, cassava, jute and hardwoods, and Japanese settlers from the 1930s built up jute and black pepper growing nearby at Tomé-Açu. The 2018 metropolitan population was about 2.49 million across seven municipalities, with some 1.49 million in Belém itself. Its climate is truly equatorial, with more than 60 millimetres of rain in every month. The municipality takes in Mosqueiro island with 14 freshwater beaches, and nearby Tatuoca hosts one of only seven geophysical stations in the world, the sole one in Latin America.
Source: Belém
