Part of the country series of articles.
TRAVEL ADVISORY: EXERCISE CAUTIONPARSTATE advises that conditions vary significantly between Brasil's urban centres and its interior regions. Travellers should exercise caution outside major cities and avoid travel near the Amazonas border zone without consulting Commonwealth consular services.
| Federal Republic of Brasil | |
|---|---|
| Federal Republic | |
 |
|
| Capital | Salvatoria |
| Languages | Spanish, Portuguese creoles, Italian, Japanese, Arabic, and many indigenous languages |
| Population | 98,400,000 |
The Federal Republic of Brasil is a large federal republic occupying most of the eastern South American landmass and is the continent’s most populous and wealthiest country. It is Spanish in language and law (alongside the Portuguese creoles that survive in the interior), and also retains Moorish and Andalusian influences in its architecture and legal traditions. The country also enjoys a significant African cultural inheritance from centuries of slavery which still shapes its cities, music and religious life. It received large waves of Southern European, Arab and Japanese immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which remain distinct enclaves in the coastal cities today.
Political power is consolidated among a handful of dynastic families and barons of industry who have controlled politics in Brasil for a century or more, despite periodic interference by military governments. The great landowning families of the interior, the industrial interests of the southern states, and the military are essentially a permanent ruling coalition that supercedes the civilian elected government. Salvatoria, the planned federal capital built on the site of the old colonial city, was intended to break the concentration of power in the southern coastal cities and to limited success.
Along its northwestern frontier is Amazonas, an impoverished indigenous republic which controls a substantial portion of the Amazon basin. The border is porous and is crossed regularly by Brasilian loggers and farmer-settlers, which provoke regular violent confrontations. It also has a competitive relationship with Argentina for economic and political influence on the South American continent. Its agricultural conglomerates have been expanding into the northern districts of Chaco despite the objection of the landholding families there.