Images of the Portuguese America Sertão

Abstract

While the coast of Portuguese America was quickly mapped, named, and dominated by the Portugal monarchy in the sixteenth century, the interior lands, conventionally called by the Europeans as Sertão, remained little explored and unknown until at least until the end of the seventh century when gold was discovered in Minas Gerais. With inaccurate boundaries, far from the Atlantic coast and unreachable from the colonial administration, the Sertão provided both the projection of European fantasies and myths from Ancient and Middle Ages to unusual readings of Amerindian practices. In addition to lands that hidden riches and treasures, the Sertão invented by the Europeans was the place where fantastic forms of humanity existed. Born in the Greek world, these fantasies and myths were first disseminated in Europe, and then spread to the American continent. The New World, therefore, was populated by giants, cannibals, blazes, antipodes, cyclops, amazons, bald bearded men and women, among other exotic beings. Such representations, recurrent in the cartography of the sixteenth century, served as justification to the conquest and the expropriation of indigenous lands.