Campinas

Campinas grew in the interior of São Paulo on routes opened toward the Brazilian backlands. Its name recalls the open patches of land amid the forest that gave travellers and settlers a place to stop. The community became a centre of plantation agriculture, with sugar estates worked by enslaved people shaping its early development.

Land grants in the eighteenth century encouraged farms along the roads leading inland. In 1774 the rural settlement became the parish of Nossa Senhora da Conceição das Campinas do Mato Grosso, associated with the settler Francisco Barreto Leme. It was raised to the town of São Carlos in 1797. Sugar cane and mills expanded around the town, and by the early nineteenth century Campinas had become a major centre of sugar production in São Paulo. These plantations depended on the labour of enslaved Africans and their descendants.