Passo Fundo

Passo Fundo lies on the southern Brazilian plateau, amid grasslands crossed by rivers and routes linking the missions with the north. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries drovers carried cattle and mules through this country towards São Paulo. In 1828 Manoel José das Neves established the Fazenda Nossa Senhora da Conceição, a nucleus of the later settlement. Yerba mate and cattle were among the resources of the surrounding uplands.