Fortaleza keeps a Dutch fortress name under a Portuguese spelling
Portuguese settlers fought French and Dutch rivals over this Ceara coast. Captain Matthias Beck's Fort Schoonenborch opened nineteen August sixteen forty-nine; after sixteen fifty-four the Portuguese renamed it Fortress of Our Lady of the Assumption, and the city still answers to that Fortress label.
Pero Coelho de Souza built Fort of Sao Tiago and Nova Lisboa in sixteen oh three during the Iberian Union; Martins Soares Moreno later expanded it as Sao Sebastiao after beating the French in sixteen twelve. Dutch forces seized the works in sixteen thirty-seven, lost them in fighting by sixteen forty-four, then rebuilt on the Pajeu. The settlement became a village in seventeen twenty-six and Ceara’s capital in seventeen ninety-nine. Nineteenth-century cotton and direct European shipping raised a customs house in eighteen twelve, and the city was a target of the eighteen twenty-four Confederation of the Equator.
The twenty twenty-four census made Fortaleza Brazil's fourth-largest city with slightly over two point five million people, edging past Salvador, while the metro holds almost four million. The twenty twenty-two count was two million four hundred twenty-eight thousand seven hundred eight residents, about sixty percent Pardo. It ranks among the Northeast's three leading cities with Recife and Salvador, sits on BR-116's northern start, and is the Mercosur port closest to mainland Europe—about five thousand six hundred eight kilometres from Lisbon. Federal University of Ceara opened in nineteen fifty-four.
Climate is tropical wet-and-dry: average about twenty-seven degrees Celsius, relative humidity around seventy-seven point five percent, and roughly one thousand five hundred eighty-four millimetres of rain, mostly January to July. Extreme years swing from four hundred sixty-eight millimetres in the eighteen seventy-seven drought to two thousand eight hundred forty-one in nineteen eighty-five. Mangroves survive in parks such as Coco, and Pedra da Risca do Meio Marine State Park protects offshore reefs since nineteen ninety-seven. A fortress name still fits a city built on contested sand and variable rain.
Source: Fortaleza
