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Cuiabá

Capital city of Mato Grosso, Brazil

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Cuiabá, Mato Grosso, Brasil
Arne Müseler · CC BY-SA 3.0 de

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Cuiabá is the heart of an urban area that also includes the state's second largest city, Várzea Grande. The city is the seat of the Federal University of Mato Grosso and the largest football stadium of the state, Arena Pantanal.

The city is a rich mix of European, African and Native American influences and numerous museums reflect this. Cuiabá is also notable for its cuisine, dance, music and craftwork. Known as the "Southern gate to the Amazon", Cuiabá experiences a hot humid tropical climate.

History

Colonial period

The first Portuguese explorers to Cuiabá were bandeirantes, explorers, slavers, and fortune hunters based in the São Paulo region. The bandeirantes aided Brazil's great expansion westward, including to the Mato Grosso region. Manoel de Campos Bicudo, a bandeirante from São Paulo, visited the Cuiabá region in 1673 and 1682. He founded the first village in the region where the Coxipó River flows into Cuiabá, and named it São Gonçalo Beira-Rio.

Pascoal Moreira Cabral, a bandeirante of Sorocaba, São Paulo, arrived at the site in 1718 and found it abandoned. He travelled up the Coxipó to enslave indigenous peoples, and fought a battle with the Coxiponé Indians, and lost. The bandeirantes returned down Coxipó, however, found gold, and enslaved indigenous people of the region for mining on the site. Cabral informed the Captaincy of São Paulo of his discovery in a letter dated April 8, 1719. He applied to be "guarda‐mor regente", or guardian and supervisor of the mines. A gold rush immediately followed Cabral's letter with prospectors mainly coming from the São Paulo region. Cabral "manag[ed] disputes and problems of all kinds" as guardian of the mines until his death in 1724.

Cuiabá was founded on January 1, 1727 by Rodrigo César de Menezes, then the "captain" of the captaincy of São Paulo in the aftermath of the discovery of gold mines. It was officially called the Vila Real do Senhor Bom Jesus de Cuiabá, a name taken from the district founded two years earlier. The Church of Our Lady of the Rosary was built at the time in the centre of the little town marked the location of a rich seam of gold. However, in 1746 much of the town was destroyed by an earthquake. Dom Antônio Rolim de Moura Tavares (1709–1782), the first Count of Azambuja, arrived in 1751 to serve as governor of the newly created Captaincy of Mato Grosso by King John V of Portugal. Tavares served in the position from 1751 to 1765, and founded Vila Bela da Santíssima Trindade as the new capital of the captaincy.

19th century

Cuiabá was elevated to township status in 1818. It became the capital of the Province of Mato Grosso in 1835 under the Empire of Brazil, replacing Vila Bela da Santíssima Trindade. Many residents of Santíssima Trindade left for Cuiabá, leaving behind houses, commercial establishments, and slaves behind in the old capital.

From the late eighteenth century, until the time of the Paraguayan War (1864–1870), the town remained small and was in decline. The war, however, brought some infrastructure and a brief period of economic boom, with Cuiabá supplying sugar, foodstuffs, and timber to the Brazilian troops. After the war, the town was once again forgotten by the rest of the country, to such an extent that the Imperial and later the Republican governments of Brazil used to use it as a site of exile for troublesome politicians. Isolation allowed it to preserve many of the oldest Brazilian ways of life until well into the twentieth century.

20th and 21st century

Starting in 1930, the isolation was diminished, with the construction of roads and later with the advent of aviation. The town became a city and would grow quite rapidly from 1960 onwards, after the establishment of the newly built Brazilian capital in Brasília.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the pace of growth would continue to increase as agriculture became commercialized, using the roads to transport soybeans and rice produced in the state in order to be sold abroad. The growth was such that from 1960 to 1980 the small town of 50,000 inhabitants grew into a giant, with more than a quarter of a million inhabitants (including those from the surrounding area and towns).

Since 1990, the rate of population growth has decreased, as other towns in the state have begun to attract more immigration than the capital. Tourism has emerged as a source of income and began to become a relevant area of the country, unlike before, when it was practically uninhabited. In 2023, Cuiabá was already considered one of the ten best cities in the country to live in, according to a UN study; it was also considered the second Brazilian city that most advanced in the last decade.

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