Cascavel

Sister cities

• Concepción

History

The Caingangue natives inhabited western Paraná, which was occupied by the Spaniards in 1557, when they founded the Ciudad del Real Guayrá, in the current city of Terra Roxa. A new occupation started in 1730 with troops (tropeirismo in Portuguese), but the settlement of the current city began in the late 1910s by settlers of mixed racial ethnicity (caboclos (people of indigenous and European descent)), and descendants of Slavic immigrants, at the peak of the cycle of erva mate. The village began to form on March 28, 1928, when José Silverio de Oliveira, dubbed "Nho Jeca", bought a glebe from the settler Jose Antonio Elias, in the historical area called Encruzilhada dos Gomes, and which is currently the Cascavel Velho neighborhood. It was at a junction of several trails open by ervateiros (cultivators of erva mate), drovers and military, where de Oliveira set up his warehouse. His entrepreneurial spirit was key to the arrival of new people, who brought ideas and investments. From the 1930s and 1940s, thousands of southern settlers, mostly descendants of Poles, Germans, Italians, Ukrainians and caboclos migrating from coffee regions, began logging, farming and raising pigs in the village, which became a district in 1938. Notably, the locality was already included in military maps from 1924, and the village was made official by the town hall of Foz do Iguaçu in 1936, with the name of Cascavel. The prelate of that city, Monsignor William Maria Thiletzek, renamed it "Aparecida dos Portos" (a Brazilian name for Mary, The Mother of Jesus), a name that did not prosper amongst the inhabitants. In the 1930s, with the cycle of erva mate at a close, the surrounding area entered into the so-called "cycle of wood", which attracted a large number of families from Santa Catarina…

Geography

Cascavel is a humid city, with a humid subtropical climate (Cfa, according to the Köppen climate classification). The annual average temperature is 21 °C (70 °F), with a maximum of 28° (85 °F). Annual average precipitation is 1965 mm (77.362 inches). According to the IBGE, the population of Cascavel is formed of the following ethnicities {| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center" |- style="background:#096;" colspan="2" !Ethnicity !Percentage |- |White |70,15% |- |Mixed |26,25% |- |Black |2,59% |- |Asian |0,88% |- |Indigenous |0,27% |} The city has experienced significant population growth since its foundation, especially during the first decades. On the other hand, several municipalities were ultimately removed from Cascavel, which slightly reduced its demographic expansion. {| class="wikitable" style="text-align:center" |- style="background:#009909;" colspan="3" !Year !Population !Percent change |- |1950 |404 | |- |1960 |39,598 |9.701% |- |1970 |89,921 |127,08% |- |1980 |163,459 |81,78% |- |1991 |192,990 |18,07% |- |2000 |245,369 |27,14% |- |2010 |286,172 |16,63% |- |2022 |348,051 |21,6% |} Cascavel is the headquarters of the Cascavel Metropolitan Region, an area undergoing conurbation that comprises 23 municipalities in the Western Mesoregion and has a total population of 552,097. It was approved by the Paraná State Legislative Assembly on December 16, 2014, through bill 402/2012 and sanctioned by Governor Beto Richa on January 14, 2015, thus meeting a long-standing local demand.

Most-observed species

• Black Vulture

  Coragyps atratus (Bechstein, 1793) · Aves
  97
• Turkey Vulture

  Cathartes aura (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  79
• Great Kiskadee

  Pitangus sulphuratus (Linnaeus, 1766) · Aves
  74
• Great Egret

  Ardea alba Linnaeus, 1758 · Aves
  72
• Bananaquit

  Coereba flaveola (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  69
• Scaled Dove

  Columbina squammata (R.Lesson, 1831) · Aves
  63
• Purple-throated Euphonia

  Euphonia chlorotica (Linnaeus, 1766) · Aves
  61
• Sayaca Tanager

  Thraupis sayaca (Linnaeus, 1766) · Aves
  60