Brazilian states, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 5 learning regions, matching the rounds on the Brazil guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 27 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Amazonas

At about 1.56 million square kilometers it is the largest state in Brazil and larger than any country in Europe, with under 4 million people in it and more than half of those in Manaus. Almost all of it is rainforest, and the roads stop within a few hundred kilometers of the capital: everything else moves by river.

Pará

About 1.25 million square kilometers, holding the mouth of the Amazon and Marajó island in it, which is about the size of Switzerland. The Carajás mine in the south is the largest iron ore operation in the world, and Belém on its coast held the UN climate conference in 2025.

Mato Grosso

About 903,000 square kilometers, and the state that grows the soy: it produces more of it than any country except the United States and the rest of Brazil. The forest ends inside it, which is why the southern edge of the Amazon is called the arc of deforestation, and its capital is close to the geographic center of South America.

Minas Gerais

The name means general mines, and the gold rush that began here in the 1690s was the largest in the world to that date: it moved the colonial capital to Rio, which is where the gold shipped from. Twenty-one million people live here now, and its iron ore is behind both of Brazil’s worst environmental disasters, at Mariana in 2015 and Brumadinho in 2019.

Bahia

The Portuguese made landfall on this coast in April 1500 and Salvador was the capital of the colony from 1549 to 1763. About 565,000 square kilometers, the largest state in the northeast, running from the Atlantic back into the dry sertão, and it received more enslaved Africans than any other part of the Americas.

Mato Grosso do Sul

Split off from the state above it in 1977, and it holds most of the Pantanal, the largest tropical wetland in the world at about 150,000 square kilometers. The floodplain fills every wet season and drains every dry one, which concentrates the wildlife into a smaller and smaller area and is why it is the best place on the continent to see a jaguar.

Goiás

The plateau in the center of Brazil, and the state the capital was cut out of. Its own capital, Goiânia, was laid out from nothing in 1933, and in 1987 scrap dealers there broke open an abandoned radiotherapy machine: the caesium inside it killed four people and left one of the worst radiological accidents on record.

Maranhão

The one Brazilian capital founded by the French, in 1612, and named for Louis XIII. The Lençóis Maranhenses on its coast are 1,550 square kilometers of white dunes that fill with rainwater every wet season and hold thousands of freshwater lagoons between them until they dry out again.

Rio Grande do Sul

The gaúcho state: pampas grassland, cattle, and a border culture it shares with Uruguay and Argentina down to the mate gourd. It fought a ten-year war of secession from 1835 and lost. In May 2024 the worst floods in its history put much of the state and parts of Porto Alegre under water.

Tocantins

The newest state in Brazil, split from Goiás by the 1988 constitution, and its capital Palmas was founded in 1989, which makes it the youngest state capital in the country. The two rivers it is named after and bordered by run north through it into the Amazon delta.

Piauí

It has about 66 kilometers of coastline, the shortest of any coastal state, and widens inland into dry sertão. The rock shelters at Serra da Capivara in the south hold thousands of painted panels and charcoal that some archaeologists date well before the usual account of when people reached the Americas, which is why the site has been argued over for forty years.

São Paulo

Forty-four million people, about a fifth of Brazil, and roughly a third of its economy in 248,000 square kilometers. Coffee planted on its red soil in the nineteenth century paid for the industry that followed, and the immigration that came with the coffee is why the state holds the largest Japanese and Italian populations outside their own countries.

Rondônia

Named after the army engineer who strung a telegraph line across the interior and mapped much of it. The highway paved through here in the 1980s brought several hundred thousand settlers up from the south in a decade, and the pattern their side roads left, a spine with ribs off it, is the fishbone visible from orbit.

Roraima

The least populated state, with about 650,000 people, and the only one whose capital is reached from the rest of Brazil by a single road. The mountain it is named for is a tabletop where Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana meet, and the Yanomami territory inside the state is the largest indigenous reserve in the country at 9.6 million hectares.

Pernambuco

The sugar coast, and rich enough in the seventeenth century that the Dutch took it and held it from 1630 to 1654, running it from Recife with a Sephardic Jewish community that left for New Amsterdam when the Portuguese took it back. The state is long and thin, reaching 700km inland from a coast of about 190km.

Ceará

Drought country: the sertão behind its beaches has failed rains often enough to have emptied itself into the Amazon and the south twice over. It abolished slavery in 1884, four years before the empire did, after the raftsmen of its ports refused to carry slaves out to the ships.

Paraná

The Iguaçu falls are in its southwestern corner, 275 separate drops along nearly three kilometers of cliff, and the Itaipu dam is 20km up the river from them. Curitiba, its capital, invented the bus rapid transit system in 1974 that Bogotá, Mexico City and Istanbul later copied.

Santa Catarina

Settled by Germans from the 1820s and Italians from the 1870s, which is why Blumenau holds the second largest Oktoberfest in the world and the accent in the interior is not what visitors expect. Its capital sits mostly on an island, joined to the mainland by a suspension bridge finished in 1926.

Amapá

The only Brazilian state with no road connection to the rest of the country: you reach it by boat or by plane. The equator runs through its capital, where a monument stands on the line, and the old Portuguese fort there is the largest colonial fortification in Brazil, built to keep the French out of the river mouth.

Acre

Brazilian since 1903, when a rubber-tappers’ rebellion against Bolivian rule ended with Brazil buying the territory for two million pounds. It runs two hours behind Brasília, the westernmost time in the country. Chico Mendes organized its tappers against the ranchers clearing the forest and was shot at his door in 1988.

Rio de Janeiro

The capital of Brazil from 1763 to 1960 and of the whole Portuguese empire from 1808 to 1821, when the court fled Napoleon and ran Portugal from the other side of the Atlantic. The offshore basins here still produce most of the country’s oil, which is why a state of 44,000 square kilometers matters as much as it does.

Espírito Santo

A narrow state whose reason for being is the railway across it: the Vitória-Minas line carries iron ore 900km from the mines inland to a port here, and it is one of the busiest freight railways in the world. The mine waste that broke loose at Mariana in 2015 came down the river and reached the sea on this coast.

Paraíba

Ponta do Seixas here is the easternmost point of the Americas, about 2,900km from Africa. The state is 56,500 square kilometers and runs from a wet coastal strip through a middle zone of sugar into hard drought country in the west, which is the whole northeast in miniature.

Rio Grande do Norte

It produces about 95 percent of Brazil’s sea salt, in evaporation pans along a coast that gets constant sun and constant wind. That wind is now the other industry: the state generates more of it than any other. Its capital was the American air bridge to Africa in the Second World War.

Alagoas

The smallest state in the northeast after the one below it, and the site of Palmares, a settlement of escaped slaves in the hills that lasted most of the seventeenth century and may have held 20,000 people before Portuguese and bandeirante forces destroyed it in 1694.

Sergipe

About 21,900 square kilometers, smaller than Wales, wedged between Bahia and Alagoas with the São Francisco river as its northern border. It was governed from Bahia until 1820 and has spent most of its history explaining that it is a state.

Distrito Federal

Brasília was built inside it in 41 months and inaugurated in April 1960, moving the capital 900km inland to pull the country away from the coast. Lúcio Costa laid the plan out in the shape of an aircraft and Oscar Niemeyer designed the buildings, and it went on the UNESCO list in 1987, younger than most of the people living in it.

How this one works

The other maps of Brazil

India has the same map in Indian states. Mexico has the same map in Mexican states. United States has the same map in American states. Germany has the same map in German states. All three together on the Brazil atlas page, the country itself on the Brazil guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.