Brazil owes its name to one of its typical kinds of wood, the deeply red colour wood - "pau brasil" in Portuguese. When Portuguese seafarers discovered the country in 1500, they used the hardwood to build ships.
For centuries, the rain forest around the Amazon River with its precious wood and its bio-diversity seemed to be an almost in-exhaustible reservoir for tropical wood. Yet ruthless deforestation and slash and burn did not only take away the livelihood of the Indian population living there but it also damaged the climate balance everywhere around the world.

Geographically, Brazil is divided into the Amazon basin in the North and the highlands in the South. The Amazon River with its more than one thousand tributaries forms the largest river basin in the world (covering about seven million square kilometres). More than two thirds of this basin are located on Brazilian territory, 45 percent of the country are shaped by it.

The largest country in South America and the fifth largest in the world is characterised by stark social contrasts. While the metropolitan area of São Paulo, a city with ten million inhabitants, is a booming industrial region, the North ranks among the poorhouses in the world. Most of Brazil's rich mineral resources have not been developed yet. With its performance in car building and machine construction, in the electronic, metal and chemical industry, Brazil is among the leading economic powers in Latin America. At the same time the country has been the biggest net debtor in the world since the beginning of the nineties.

From the cultural point of view, Brazil has given much to the world with its music in particular - Samba rhythms and melancholic saudade ballads. The architect Oscar Niemeyer, who designed the capital of Brasilia, is internationally renowned. Novels by the writer Jorge Amado, which take a critical look at society, have been translated into more than 30 languages. And then of course their is the national sport of football - after all, almost all boys dream of becoming a second Pelé.