Itapiracaba

Itapiraçaba was an Indigenous settlement on the middle São Francisco, associated in historical accounts with the place later occupied by Januária. The inhabitants were described as Caiapó, a name used in colonial writing for Indigenous populations whose distinctions were often poorly recorded. Their settlement stood in a region increasingly penetrated by cattle raisers and armed expeditions at the end of the seventeenth century.

Historical studies connect its destruction with Januário Cardoso and Manuel Pires Maciel. One study places the conquest approximately in 1701, while emphasizing the ensuing dispossession of the inhabitants and transfer of their lands. The settlement's history thus belongs to the violent expansion of colonial control along the São Francisco, where Indigenous occupation was displaced by estates, cattle raising and new settlements.