Brazil historical timeline

Chronology

1. 1494 — The Treaty of Tordesillas divides the unexplored world between Portugal and Spain. The line it drew is why Brazil speaks Portuguese and every country around it speaks Spanish.
2. 1500 — Pedro Álvares Cabral's fleet arrives on 22 April and claims the land for the Portuguese Empire. The territory was already inhabited by many indigenous peoples, whose descendants are still here and whose languages supplied most Brazilian place names.
3. 1532 — Portugal founds the country's first city, São Vicente, on the coast of what is now São Paulo state, and begins importing enslaved Africans. Brazil received more of them than anywhere else in the Americas, which is the single largest fact behind its music, religion and food.
4. 1549 — The failed captaincy system is restructured into a single Governorate General based at Salvador, which becomes the colonial capital. Salvador's Pelourinho, the upper-town centre built on that century, is the reason the city is a World Heritage Site.
5. 1807 — With Napoleonic forces threatening Portugal, the Prince Regent moves the entire royal court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro and founds Brazil's first financial institutions there. A colony becomes the seat of its own empire — a reversal with no parallel in the Americas — and in 1818 João VI is acclaimed king of a United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves in Rio.
6. 1822 — Pedro I declares independence on 7 September, now the national holiday. The last Portuguese soldiers surrender on 8 March 1824, and Brazil becomes an empire rather than a republic, keeping a Braganza on the throne.
7. 1831 — Worn down by administrative turmoil and political dissent, Pedro I abdicates on 7 April, leaving a child heir and a long regency.
8. 1850 — The Atlantic slave trade is outlawed under British pressure and the Eusébio de Queirós Law, but slavery itself survives another thirty-eight years.
9. 1888 — Slavery is abolished in May, the last country in the Americas to do it. The absence of any settlement for the freed population is the origin of inequalities visible in every Brazilian city today.
10. 1889 — On 15 November the monarchy is overthrown, against the wishes of most Brazilians but with the Imperial Army officers, rural and financial elites behind it. The early republic is a military dictatorship: press freedom disappears and elections are controlled from above.
11. 1932 — The Constitutionalist Revolution, led by São Paulo's oligarchy, is the first of three failed attempts that decade to remove Getúlio Vargas; a communist uprising follows in November 1935 and a fascist putsch after that.
12. 1942 — Brazil stays neutral until August, when German and Italian attacks in a strategic dispute over the South Atlantic bring it into the war on the Allied side. It is the only South American country to send ground troops to Europe.
13. 1956 — Juscelino Kubitschek becomes president. Construction of the National Congress in the new capital is under way by 1959, and Oscar Niemeyer's buildings there — the cathedral among them — make Brasília the one purpose-built modernist capital anyone visits as architecture.
14. 1968 — A military regime intended to be transitory closes in on itself and becomes a full dictatorship with the Fifth Institutional Act. Repression extends well beyond those who took up arms.
15. 1985 — Civilians return to power under José Sarney, who is then undone by the hyperinflation inherited from the military regime.
16. 2016 — Dilma Rousseff is impeached halfway through her second term, the impeachment accepted on 31 August, and replaced by her vice-president Michel Temer. Large crowds demonstrate on both sides on the Esplanade of Ministries in Brasília.