What is rio de janeiro full name

According to tradition, the spot now called Rio de Janeiro was first visited in January by Portuguese explorers, who believed the bay they encountered now called Guanabara Bay was the mouth of a river.

The Portuguese were the first European explorers on the scene, but the French were the first settlers. It was the beginning of a colony named France Antarctique , meant to provide both a strategic base for France in the Americas and a refuge for persecuted French Protestants. The colony was short-lived, however: After a fight with a second group of settlers over whether the wine consecrated in the Eucharist should contain water, Villegagnon was expelled to the mainland and eventually went back to France.

The colony briefly continued without him, but sectarian strife spelled trouble from within, while the Portuguese became a threat from without. In , the Portuguese destroyed the colony, cementing their hold on the country. Prospectors discovered gold in Brazil in the s, and diamonds a few decades later. As the closest port to the mines, Rio boomed—and the French noticed. Already embroiled in a war with the Portuguese, they sent privateers to attack in That group failed, but others came back better-armed the following year.

This time they were successful, bombarding Rio until the Portuguese governor fled, taking most of the population with him. The governor, Francisco de Castro Morais, eventually negotiated Rio back for , gold cruzados and chests of sugar , but the Portuguese sentenced him to exile in Portuguese India for being such a coward.

It served as the capital of the Portuguese Empire for almost seven years. When it comes to the etymology of city names, few cities have stories as interesting or misguided as Rio de Janeiro. As the second-largest city in Brazil gears up for the Summer Olympics, non-Brazilians might be wondering: What does Rio de Janeiro mean? The name "Rio de Janeiro" literally translates to "River of January" in Portuguese, which is actually a misnomer because there is no river in Rio.

The popular account given is that Portuguese colonists mistook the Guanabara Bay the city's large, beautiful bay for the mouth of a river, and "discovered" it in Jan. Despite the somewhat amusing colonial flop, there is apparently some dispute by language scholars whether the term "rio" could have meant any large body of water in 16th century Portuguese parlance, Smithsonian Magazine reported.

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