Santo Ângelo

Santo Ângelo on the map of Rio Grande do Sul

Santo Ângelo (population 79 603 ) is a city in Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil. Its territory covers 680.5 km ².

Geography

Santo Ângelo lies in the west of the plateau of the Rio Grande on the Rio Ijuí at an altitude of 286 m. The distance to the provincial capital of Porto Alegre is about 460 kilometers.

The neighboring communities are the Missões in the north to the south Giruá Entre- Ijuís and Vitória; in the east and in the west Guarani Catuípe the Missões.

History

Santo Ângelo is in the field of " Siete Pueblos de las Misiones ", founded by the Jesuits in the 17th and 18th century missions. The city was founded in 1706 by the Belgian Jesuit Diogo Haze as a Jesuit reduction, they had up to 8,000 residents and was a cultural and economic center, but was destroyed in 1756 and 1830 re-inhabited.

At the end of the 19th century settled in Santo Ângelo many European immigrants settled, inter alia, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia and the Netherlands. Since the thirties of the 20th century, the city experienced an economic and industrial bloom and had up to 115,000 inhabitants. After the decline of industry in the 1980s that forced nearly ten percent of the population to out-migration, which city has recovered since the 1990s. She has since also a university center with about 6000 students.