Brazil’s Portuguese Connection

Portuguese is spoken in Brazil, while Spanish is spoken in every other country of South America. There is 500 years of colonial history to explain this disparity. While Spain occupied much of the rest of South America to the west, the explorer Pedro Alvarez Cabral claimed Brazil for Portugal in 1500. Remember that Portugal is a tiny country. You can imagine how keen they were to have a country like Brazil, which is 90 times the size of tiny Portugal. But there were not enough Portuguese to populate the country or mine its resources. The Portuguese answer was slavery. They enslaved many indigenous people and even imported Africa slaves to work in Brazil. That is why you see so many black-skinned people there today.

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