Sertão

The sertão (, plural sertões) is the "hinterland" or "backcountry" of Brazil. The word refers both to one of the four sub-regions of the Northeast Region of Brazil or the hinterlands of the country in general (similar to the specific association of "outback" with Australia in English). Northeast Brazil is largely covered in a scrubby upland forest called caatingas, from the Tupi language, meaning white forest, since leaves fall during dry season, donning all vegetation, mainly bushes and small trees, now reduced to bare branches and trunks, in its characteristic very light grayish, or off-white, hues. Its borders are not precise. Due to lengthy and unpredictable droughts it is an economically poor region that is well known in Brazilian culture, with a rich history and folklore. The sertão is also detailed within the famous book of Brazilian literature Os Sertões (The Backlands), which was written by the Brazilian author Euclides da Cunha.

Originally the term referred to the vast hinterlands of Asia and South America that Portuguese explorers encountered. In Brazil, it referred to backlands away from the Atlantic coastal regions where the Portuguese first settled in the early sixteenth century. A Brazilian historian once referred to colonial life in Brazil as a "civilization of crabs", as most settlers clung to the shoreline, with few trying to make inroads into the sertão. In modern terms, "sertão" refers to a semi-arid region in northeastern Brazil, comprising parts of the states of Alagoas, Bahia, Pernambuco, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Norte, Ceará, Maranhão, Piauí, Sergipe, and Minas Gerais.

Geographically, the sertão consists mainly of low uplands that form part of the Brazilian highlands. Most parts of the sertão are between 200 meters and 500 meters above sea level, with higher elevations found on the eastern edge in the Borborema Plateau, where it merges into a sub-humid region known as agreste, in the Serra da Ibiapaba in western Ceará and in the Serro do Periquito of central Pernambuco. In the north, the sertão extends to the northern coastal plains of Rio Grande do Norte state, while to the south it ends gradually in the northern part of Minas Gerais.

Two major rivers cross the sertão, the Jaguaribe and further east the Piranhas, and to the south, the larger São Francisco River is in part in the sertão. Smaller rivers dry up at the end of the rainy season.

The term sertão is also used in Portuguese to refer to the Brazilian hinterland in general, regardless of region. It is this sense that corresponds to sertão music, música sertaneja, roughly "country music". To avoid ambiguity, the region in the northeast is sometimes called the sertão nordestino, while the Brazilian hinterland may also be called the sertânia, the land of sertões.

Etymology
There are a number of hypotheses about the origin of the word Sertão, most of which place its appearance during the colonization of Brazil by the Portuguese. The most widespread of these holds that, when they left the Brazilian coast and moved inland, the Lusitanian settlers noticed a big difference in the climate of this semi-arid region and referred to it as "desertão" (big desert), due to its hot, dry climate. Therefore, this name would have been understood as "de sertão" (of the sertão), leaving only the word Sertão.

The hypothesis of a corruption of "desertão" is challenged on the basis of phonetics, which reaffirms the impossibility of sertão being a corruption of the Latin desertanu due to the inversion that this path would mean from the point of view of the law of least effort, implying a sonorization of the occlusive as opposed to deafening, which would be the most natural progression.

The immortal of the Brazilian Academy of Letters Gustavo Barroso also rejected this hypothesis and argued that the origin of the word was in the term muchitum, from the Mbunda language of Angola, which means "place in the interior". The term would have been adopted by the Portuguese colonizers in the form of "mulcetão", later reduced to "celtão" and "certão", and then spread throughout the Lusitanian overseas empire during the first centuries of its expansion.

It is also possible that, on the contrary, the Angolan term arose from contact with the Portuguese, given that the town of Sertã, in Portuguese lands, dates back to long before the time of the great navigations. According to local legend, the town was founded in 74 BC by the Roman general Quintus Sertorius under the name "Sertaga", corrupted to "Sartão". On one occasion when enemy troops attacked the settlement, a woman defended herself from the soldiers with a large sertãa, a square frying pan, saving the village. The popularization of the legend and its phonetic similarity to the name of the place would have meant that this word was also used, by extension, to characterize the surroundings of this settlement, one of the most inland lands in the continental Portuguese territory, and later became a synonym for inland lands throughout the nascent Portuguese empire.

Climate and vegetation
Because the sertão lies just south of the equator, temperatures are nearly uniform throughout the year and are typically tropical, often extremely hot in the west.

However, the sertão is distinctive in its low rainfall compared to other areas of Brazil. Because of the relatively cool temperatures in the South Atlantic Ocean, the intertropical convergence zone remains north of the region for most of the year, so that most of the year is very dry.

Although annual rainfall averages between 500 mm and 800 mm over most of the sertão and 1300 mm on the northern coast at Fortaleza, it is confined to a short rainy season. This season extends from January to April in the west, but in the eastern sertão it generally occurs from March to June. However, rainfall is extremely erratic and in some years the rains are minimal, leading to catastrophic drought, while in others rains are extremely heavy and floods occur. This variability has caused extreme famines among subsistence farmers in the region, exacerbated by the extreme imbalance of land ownership throughout the sertão. The worst of these famines, between 1877 and 1879, was said to have killed over half the region's population.

In its natural state, the sertão was covered by a distinctive scrubby caatinga vegetation, consisting generally of low thorny bushes adapted to the extreme climate. Several species of tree in the caatinga, such as the cashew, have become valuable horticultural plants. Most of the sertão vegetation is now substantially degraded as a result of centuries of cattle ranching or clearing for cotton farming.

Parts of the sertão are recognized as a biodiversity hot-spot because of its unique flora.

Nonfiction

 * Michael H. Glantz; Currents of Change: El Niño's Impact on Climate and Society; published 1996 by Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-57659-8.
 * Michael H. Glantz (ed.); Drought Follows The Plow: Cultivating Marginal Areas; published 1994 by Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-44252-4.
 * Fagan, Brian; Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations; published 2000 by Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-01121-7.
 * Nicholas G. Arons; Waiting for Rain: The Politics and Poetry of Drought in Northeast Brazil; published 2004 by University of Arizona Press. ISBN 0-8165-2433-5.
 * Euclides da Cunha, Rebellion in the Backlands (Os Sertões), 1902

Fiction

 * Graciliano Ramos, Vidas Secas ("Barren Lives"), novel