A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
cerrado
The cerrado is the tropical savanna of central Brazil, grassland with gnarled, thick-barked, deep-rooted trees scattered through it, covering something like a fifth of the country. The soil is old, acid, and poor, and the vegetation is built around that. Roots go down thirty feet or more to reach water, bark grows thick enough to survive a grass fire, and most of the living matter sits underground, which is why it gets called an upside-down forest.
Etymology
The word is Portuguese for closed or shut. It describes the tangled, close-grown scrub of the denser forms, country you cannot easily walk through, even though a lot of the cerrado is open ground with trees standing well apart. Brazilian usage grades it by how thick it is, from campo limpo, clean field, meaning pure grassland, to cerradão, big cerrado, which is nearly closed woodland.
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