Uma cidade para entender como o Brasil ocupou a Amazônia e o dilema da floresta.

Explore Brazil through its cities with our weekly documentaries. Santarém, in western Pará, is one of the oldest cities in the Amazon and occupies a strategic position at the confluence of the Tapajós and Amazon rivers. Throughout history, the city has witnessed the different phases of the region's occupation: the Amazon of the rivers and missions, the rubber boom, the arrival of roads, the expansion of agriculture, and, more recently, the integration of the region into the global economy through grain export logistics. In this video, Santarém does not appear as a tourist destination, but as a key to understanding the history, geography, and economy of the Brazilian Amazon — and the current challenge of reconciling development and forest preservation. This video is part of the series "Brazil of the Cities," which shows how many cities outside the tourist circuit help to understand the history, economy, culture, and organization of the Brazilian territory. Voice and images/animations by AI. Brazil of the Cities is not a tourism channel. It is a channel about the real Brazil. Here, cities don't appear as postcards, lists of attractions, or promises of the perfect weekend. They appear as what they truly are: living structures that sustain entire regions, concentrating people, decisions, services, work, culture, and history—often far from the spotlight. The channel starts from a simple and powerful idea: to understand Brazil, you need to understand its cities. Especially those that aren't capitals, haven't made headlines, and aren't on traditional tourist routes, but that organize the lives of millions of Brazilians every day. Each video analyzes a city as a system—observing its regional function, its cycles of growth and transformation, its moments of historical inflection, its invisible institutions, and its cultural and symbolic dimension. The goal is not to "sell" the city, but to explain it. Here, past and present are treated honestly. Economic cycles are not romanticized. Declines are not hidden. Reinventions are carefully observed. When we talk about commerce, industry, education, health, or culture, we speak of them as structural pillars—not as slogans. When we use images, they serve to illustrate ideas, not to create an artificial or foreign aesthetic. The commitment is to verisimilitude, coherence, and clarity. Brazil of Cities is, above all, an exercise in urban reading. An attempt to see the country from the ground up, from the streets, from the institutions, and from the choices that shaped each place. At the end of each video, the proposal is simple: that you not only get to know a city better— but understand a little more about how Brazil really works. Welcome to the Brazil that doesn't shout, but sustains.