Current Time in Cascavel, Brazil

Cascavel lies in the west of the Brazilian state of Parana, on a plateau some eight hundred metres above sea level between the Iguaçu and Piquiri rivers. With around three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants it is the largest city in western Parana and the commercial, medical and educational hub for a region of well over a million people. Its name means rattlesnake, after the snakes the first settlers found when they cleared the forest.

The city is remarkably young. Where today there are avenues, shopping centres and university campuses, there was dense subtropical forest within living memory. Settlement began in earnest in the 1930s and 1940s with timber cutting, and the municipality was created only in 1952. Most of the settlers came south to north, from Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, and many were descendants of Italian and German immigrants, joined by families from Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais and by earlier caboclo residents. That mixture shows in the churches, the food and the strong cooperative tradition of the region.

Agriculture made the city prosperous. Once the timber was gone, the deep red soil proved outstandingly fertile, and western Parana became one of Brazil's most productive farming regions, producing soybeans, maize, wheat and cassava, and raising poultry and pigs on an enormous scale. Cascavel is the headquarters of major agricultural cooperatives and processing companies, and every February it hosts one of the largest agricultural technology fairs in Latin America, where hundreds of thousands of visitors inspect machinery, seed varieties and livestock over the course of a week.

The city is laid out on a generous grid with wide avenues and plenty of green space. Its most popular spot is the Lago Municipal, an artificial lake surrounded by an environmental park with walking tracks, forest and a zoo. The modern cathedral, a tall conical structure visible across the city, is an architectural landmark, and there are parks, a cultural centre, theatres and a busy calendar of concerts and rodeos.

Cascavel's location makes it a natural crossroads. Major federal highways meet here, linking the port of Paranagua on the Atlantic with the Paraguayan border, and the city sits about one hundred and forty kilometres from Foz do Iguaçu and its waterfalls, with the Itaipu reservoir and its beaches even closer. An airport provides connections to Curitiba and Sao Paulo.

Higher education is a major strength. The State University of Western Parana has its largest campus here, with a medical school and a teaching hospital, and private universities add thousands of students. The city is also a regional referral centre for health care, including a well-known cancer hospital serving the whole west of the state.

Young, planned and prosperous, Cascavel is a good example of how Brazil's agricultural frontier became a network of modern inland cities.