Tag: Portuguese

Open grassland or savanna, especially in South America — the vast, treeless or lightly treed plains of Brazil's interior. The cerrado (wooded savanna) and campo limpo (clean grassland) together form one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the tropics. The word names openness — land without trees, land you can see across.

A deep, fertile, charcoal-rich dark soil found in patches throughout the Amazon basin, created by Indigenous peoples over centuries through the deliberate incorporation of charcoal, bone, pottery shards, compost, and manure into the naturally poor tropical soil. Terra preta is not natural; it is engineered — a technology for making the infertile Amazon clay productive, practiced for at least 2,500 years before European contact and largely forgotten afterward. Patches of terra preta remain strikingly fertile today, often centuries after the people who made them were gone.