How old is brazil as a country

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As with many South American countries , the history of Brazil begins with indigenous people, and dates back over 10, years. But very little is known about the history of Brazil before the arrival of the Portuguese in , as the tribes tended to be semi-nomadic with no permanent buildings and no written records.

Pedro Alvares Cabral. Photo credit: wikipedia. The Portuguese tried to use the native indigenous people as slaves to produce sugar for Europe, but in the end they resorted to bringing in slaves from Africa.

Later they hunted escaped Indian and African slaves. For two centuries after Cabral's discovery, the Portuguese had to periodically deal with foreign powers with designs on Brazil's resources. Although Portugal and Spain had the Treaty of Tordesillas -- which set boundaries for each country in their newly discovered lands -- the guidelines were vague, causing the occasional territory dispute.

Further, England, France, and Holland didn't fully recognize the treaty, which was made by Papal decree, and were aggressively seeking new lands in pirate-ridden seas. Such competition made the Lusitanian foothold in the New World tenuous at times.

The new territory faced internal as well as external challenges. Initially, the Portuguese Crown couldn't establish a strong central government in the subcontinent. For much of the colonial period, it relied on "captains," low ranking nobles and merchants who were granted authority over captaincies, slices of land often as big as their motherland.

By it was evident that most of the captaincies were failing. Portugal's monarch dispatched a governor-general who arrived with soldiers, priests, and craftspeople to oversee them and to establish a capital today's Salvador in the central captaincy of Bahia. At the end of the 17th century, the news that fabulous veins of emeralds, diamonds, and gold had been found in Minas Gerais exploded in Lisbon.

The region began to export 30, pounds of gold a year to Portugal. Bandeirantes and other fortune hunters rushed in from all over, and boat loads of carpenters, stonemasons, sculptors, and painters came from Europe to build cities in the Brazilian wilderness.

In , the capital was moved to Rio de Janeiro for a variety of political and administrative reasons. The country had successfully staved off invasions by other European nations and it had roughly taken its current shape. It added cotton and tobacco to sugar, gold, and diamonds on its list of exports. As the interior opened so did the opportunities for cattle ranching.