A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
sertao
The sertão is the dry interior of northeastern Brazil, a vast region of thorn scrub, cactus, and bare rock inselbergs that receives erratic rain and can go years without useful rain at all. It carries the caatinga vegetation and it has produced a distinct culture with its own music, cattle-herding tradition, and enormous body of ballad literature.
Etymology
The word is Portuguese for the backlands or the interior, and its origin is not settled; the most repeated account reads it as a contraction of a phrase meaning the great interior. In Brazilian usage, it means the interior in general as much as this specific region, and it carries a strong sense of distance from the coast where nearly everyone lives.