Paraíba

Paraíba, estado (state) of northeastern Brazil. Primarily an agricultural state, Paraíba is bounded by the states of Rio Grande do Norte on the north, Ceará on the west, and Pernambuco on the south and by the Atlantic Ocean on the east. Its chief river, the Paraíba, rises on the Pernambuco border and enters the Atlantic Ocean near the state capital, João Pessoa. The only other large city is Campina Grande, a sisal and cotton-shipping centre farther inland.

Paraíba is a name of Tupí Indian origin formed from the words para and hiba, meaning “arm of the river.” The name of the capital was itself formerly Paraíba, but it was changed to honour the memory of a former governor, João Pessoa, a reformist and national vice presidential candidate whose assassination in 1930 helped spark the revolution that brought Getúlio Vargas to national power in Brazil.

Northeastern Brazil was the first part of the country to become wealthy when, in the 16th century, the Portuguese established the world’s first large-scale sugarcane plantations there with African slave labour. Founded on August 5, 1585, as the captaincy of Itamaracá (a captaincy being virtually a fiefdom granted by the Portuguese crown), Paraíba shared in the sugarcane riches of the period, and, because sugar required large investments and cheap labour, economic and political power fell into the hands of a few wealthy landowning families. In the 18th century cotton was first produced and became a significant export.

Physiographically, Paraíba in the east has a narrow coastland of sandy beaches and dunes off which deep-sea fishermen, or raftsmen, ride the surf on tree-trunk rafts. There is no coastal plain; from this seaboard the land rises abruptly to coastal mesas, which, together with a few inland river valleys, provide the principal wealth of the state—sugar, pineapples, and sisal, together with livestock and hides. These coastal areas, enjoying dependable rainfall, were once covered by dense tropical forests, but from the early period of plantations on they were cleared for crops and pastures. To the west, behind the zone of coastal mesas, a hilly upland known as the Borborema Plateau occupies most of the central part of the state. A variety of minerals are mined on the plateau, though their economic importance is less than that of agriculture. The plateau is a semiarid region once covered by deciduous, thorny scrub woodland called caatinga. In the caatinga there are only small areas of forest on the tops of the higher mountains. Although Paraíba does periodically suffer severe droughts, this area generally is dry not so much because of a lack of measurable rain as because of the unevenness of the rainfall and the poor drainage. Rain falls in summer and autumn and evaporates quickly or, partly because of excessive clearing of the land, runs off the impermeable ground, leaving sandy gullies and pebble-strewn stretches of dry earth. Life in the caatinga country thus depends on irrigation; the federal government has built a number of reservoirs; however, the nature of the hilly land permits irrigated crops to be raised only around the margins of the lakes behind the dams. Finally, Paraíba’s farthest western section consists of broad plains—peneplains, or semiarid flatlands, developed by erosion, with only a few tablelands called chapadas remaining from an earlier era.

Since the 1960s Paraíba has been developing industrially. Two industrial parks in João Pessoa and Campina Grande house a wide range of industries, including clothing, agricultural machinery, cellulose, plastics, soaps, synthetic fibres, stoves, and rubber shoes. Moderately serviceable highways crosscut the state to connect it with the rest of Brazil. In the early 1970s power lines brought electrical energy from Pernambuco and distributed it among all the towns of Paraíba. The Universidade Federal da Paraíba (1955) has campuses in João Pessoa, Campina Grande, Areia, Bananeiras, Cajazeiras, Sousa, and Patos. Area 21,792 square miles (56,440 square km). Pop. (2022) 4,030,961.