Machine translation of the Portuguese Wikipedia article (November 2026 version).
Bento Gonçalves is a Brazilian municipality in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, in the South Region of the country. Over the course of its history, it has also been known as Cruzinha and Colônia Dona Isabel. The city was built on the seat of the Colônia Dona Isabel, a district of the city of Montenegro until 1890. The area was traversed by Caingang Indigenous people, who settled in small groups, especially along the banks of the Antas River, but they were gradually displaced by the so-called “bugreiros”, opening space, at the end of the 19th century, for the Empire of Brazil to decide to colonize the region with a European population. Thus, thousands of immigrants, mostly Italians from the Veneto region but including members of other origins such as Germans, French, Spaniards and Poles, crossed the sea and climbed the Serra Gaúcha, opening up an area that was still almost entirely untouched.
Text: Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Read the full article on Wikipedia (in Portuguese)