Portuguese Community in Brazil

Source: rouxinoldebernardim.blogspot.com

Brazil is the country with the largest Portuguese community outside Portugal and although official records inform that such community have 5 million members, there are unofficial estimations that this number could be of 18 million members.

Most Brazilians have some degree of Portuguese ancestry: some descend from colonial settlers, while others have recent immigrant Portuguese origin, dating back to anywhere between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries.

Due to "miscegenation", Brazilians of different "races" may have Portuguese ancestry: Whites, Blacks, Amerindians and people of mixed race.

There are no reliable figures for how many Brazilians descend from the Portuguese.

This is mainly because the Portuguese presence in Brazil is very old, making it almost impossible to find correct numbers.

Even though most Brazilians have Portuguese ancestry, most Brazilians identify themselves as being simply Brazilians.

In 1872, there were 3.7 million Whites in Brazil (the vast majority of them of Portuguese ancestry), 4.1 million mixed-race people (mostly of Portuguese-Amerindian-African ancestry) and 1.9 million Blacks (some of whom probably had some degree of Portuguese ancestry).

These numbers give the percentage of 80% of people with total or partial Portuguese ancestry in Brazil in the 1870s. 

At that time, the Portuguese were the only Europeans to settle Brazil in large numbers, since other groups (notably Italians) only started arriving in large numbers after 1875.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a new large wave of immigrants from Portugal arrived. From 1881 to 1991, over 1.5 million Portuguese immigrated to Brazil.

In 1906, for example, there were 133,393 Portuguese-born people living in Rio de Janeiro, comprising 16% of the city's population. Rio is still today considered the largest "Portuguese city" outside of Portugal itself.

Genetic studies also confirm the strong proportion of Portuguese genetic ancestry in Brazilians.

According to one study, at least half of the Brazilian population's Y chromosome comes from Portugal. Black Brazilians have an average of 48% non-African genes; most of them may have Portuguese ancestors.

Source: Wikipedia

Larissa Bona