Bom Dia!

All throughout Central and South America, you’ll find the Spanish language dominating almost everywhere. There are two nations that stand out as exceptions, though. One of them is tiny: Belize was a British colony until 1981, so the English language still has a very strong foothold there.

The other one is the largest nation in the entire region. In Brazil, they speak a particular brand of Portuguese, not Spanish—although you can certainly make your way around Brazil if you know Spanish and are patient.

Why should one giant nation speak Portuguese while everyone else speaks Spanish, you might wonder? I certainly asked myself this question when I visited Rio and Sao Paolo in 2004 and 2005.

Most kids probably learn about the Treaty of Tordesillas at some point in school, but you’re definitely off the hook if that name doesn’t ring any bells. This is the time when Spain and Portugal decided to divide the world up into halves they each owned.

This was just barely after Columbus set foot in the Americas, rocking the world and shuffling around the balance of power for centuries to come. Columbus himself was an Italian merchant working at the pleasure of the Spanish crown, but he had first offered his services to the Portuguese, who were eager explorers and colonizers.

Within a virtual instant, Spain and Portugal were at one another’s throats, jockeying for power and, as leaders in Europe began to see it, fighting over their slice of the pie instead of focusing on growing the pie itself. The nations got together so that each nation could have its own profitable venture, each agreeing to leave parts of the world to the other.

In the end, the Treaty of Tordesillas proclaimed that Spain would get anything to the west of a particular longitudinal line on a map, while Portugal got anything to the east.

The islands where Columbus first landed were the Bahamas, just off the coast of present day Florida, and just north of Cuba. As impressive as this so-called discovery was, the Portuguese had also connected distant islands to their growing empire. The most distant of these was the Cape Verde Islands, hundreds of miles west of the African coast.

Pope Alexander VI (AKA “the Borgia Pope”) wanted the two kingdoms to stop fighting. While there may have been some moral concerns here, Borgia mainly wanted the Vatican’s revenues to continue to flow in uninterrupted, and war was keeping the wealth from the new world from getting to the Vatican’s coffers.

In order to keep the peace, he drew an imaginary line just west of the Cape Verdes, suggesting that Portugal keep everything east of that line. Portugal naturally wanted to negotiate that line farther west, and they eventually got what they wanted with the Treaty of Tordesillas, which both nations signed in 1494.

This so-called Line of Demarcation led to all sorts of unexpected surprises.

In 1500, a navigator named Pedro Álvares Cabral set off on a voyage to India, hoping to head west and ultimately avoid having to go all the way around Africa, a route the Portuguese had recently discovered that gave them an enormous trade advantage in the far east.

Unfortunately for Cabral, his fleet was blown off course. This could easily mean starvation or death by scurvy for everyone.

Fortunately for the entire fleet, they found a beautiful natural port called Porto Seguro, in present day Bahia, Brazil. Even better, it turned out that this eastern bulge of the southern American landmass was east of the Line of Demarcation.

Here’s one of those surprises: 20 times more people speak Portuguese in Brazil as do in Portugal. More than 200 million Brazilian Portuguese-speakers have induced me to learn a little bit of the language myself.

A more sinister outcome: because of Brazil’s proximity to Africa, and because of Portugal’s growing ambitions in Africa, more human beings were brought as slaves to Brazil than to all of the rest of the Americas combined. This is worth pausing to consider for a moment.

It’s also worth remembering the indigenous population of Brazil. While Cabral and his fleet felt like they had done a solid service for Christian Europe by “discovering” this new land, the people who were already living there certainly saw things very differently.

The culture in Brazil is unique, and it exists in its present form at the pleasure of the Line of Demarcation. It is this very blend of troubling history that makes Brazil what it is today, a place where a unique martial art can develop into something I start learning in the late 1990s in the United States, then base several small businesses off of.

It is this blend of cultures from all over the world that make Brazil unique. If you want to see what some of that looks like, you can hardly do better than the festival of Carnival. The celebration itself isn’t unique to Brazil, but the particular blend of cultures absolutely is.

I’m grateful for my own time visiting Brazil, where I got to see this unique blend up close. If you want to read more about that, I’ve written fairly recently about my trips, especially to the favelas in Rio: