Abare I

Abare I lies in the interior of São Paulo state, in the upper Paranapanema country. The Paranapanema rises in the highlands of São Paulo and flows west through forested plateau and rolling grassland before joining the Paraná. Rivers and gallery forest gave Indigenous farmers water, fish and passage across the plateau.

Kaingang and Guaraní-speaking peoples lived along these rivers before European contact. Families cleared garden plots for maize and cassava, hunted in the forest and fished the rivers, while trails linked valleys across the plateau. From the seventeenth century Paulista bandeirantes and missionaries pressed into the Paraná basin in search of captives, labour and converts, and the plateau became a contested zone where Indigenous networks and colonial expansion overlapped.