Jundiai Forest

The wooded country around Jundiaí lay on the advancing frontier of Portuguese settlement in São Vicente. Indigenous communities cultivated maize and manioc before colonists entered the region in the early seventeenth century. Newcomers adopted local building practices and the use of fire in cultivation, while their expansion drove some inhabitants farther into the forest.

The settlement of Nossa Senhora do Desterro became a vila on 14 December 1656. Its wider countryside served expeditions and muleteers moving into the interior, and small farms supplied travellers as well as the town. Grants of land divided the region into sesmarias. Enslaved Indigenous labour sustained much of this economy before the growing use of enslaved Africans during the eighteenth century. Forest, farmland and routes of movement consequently belonged to the same colonial frontier. The woodland surrounding Jundiaí offered refuge to displaced people while also lying within a countryside increasingly drawn into settlement, provisioning and coercive labour.