Puri

The Puri, also called the Coroado, are an Indigenous people of southeastern Brazil whose lands covered the Paraíba do Sul basin and stretches of the Rio Grande and Doce rivers. They lived in small forest bands, combining hunting and gathering with shifting farming, and spoke a language once grouped with Macro-Jê but regarded as isolated.

The Portuguese conquest of the interior dispossessed them, and during the 1600s many bands withdrew northward down the Paraíba do Sul to its lower tributaries, while others were settled in mission villages and put to work on farms and in mines.

Through the 1700s Puri groups appeared in frontier records as raiders, porters and mission Indians, their numbers worn down by disease, enslavement and assimilation; by the early 1800s their separate language and identity were in retreat.