Coffee Plantations of Brazil: A Comparison of Occupance Patterns in Established and Frontier Areas

Abstract

The form of the coffee region reflects the advance of a frontier.1 A century and a half ago coffee was an experimental crop on coastal lowlands near Rio de Janeiro and Santos, narrowly confined between the sea and the escarpment of the Serra do Mar. Then, leaping the first mountain barrier, whose rugged seaward slope is still forest clad and unproductive, coffee began to flourish in the more congenial trough back of the coast range, particularly in the valley of the Rio Parahyba, where there are slopes and terraces more than a thousand feet above the sea. Here plantations still persist. But this also is a narrow strip of mountain-bound land. The trough extends southwestward beyond the head of the Rio Parahyba, though here it is hilly and infertile. This unproductive section, where the city of Sao Paulo now stands, is opposite a low and narrow part of the Serra da Mantiqueira giving easy access to the least rugged and most fertile part of the highland region beyond the mountain ranges. Here a century ago coffee leaped the second mountain barrier and established itself in the Campinas district, the threshold of a region of rolling uplands just within the tropics, two or three thousand feet above the sea, hot and humid in summer, warm and less humid in winter, diversified in soil, cut by stream valleys leading northwestward to the Rio Parana, toward which the plateau surface gradually descends.