São Leopoldo

Machine translation of the Portuguese Wikipedia article (November 2026 version).

São Leopoldo is a Brazilian municipality in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, in the Porto Alegre Metropolitan Region. It was the first city founded by German immigrants in Brazil.

It was inhabited by the Carijó Indigenous people and by immigrants from the Azores. It was a village known as the Feitoria do Linho-cânhamo (Hemp and Flax Trading Post) when the first 39 German immigrants arrived in the region on 25 July 1824, sent by the Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro I to populate it. The defunct Real Feitoria do Linho Cânhamo had been a government agricultural establishment where ropes were produced, but it had not yielded much and had gone bankrupt, among other reasons due to the corruption of its administrators.

This feitoria was located on the left bank of the Rio dos Sinos. The date of 25 July 1824 came to be regarded as the founding date of São Leopoldo. While they were housed at the feitoria until they received their colonial lots, the settlement was named the “German Colony of São Leopoldo” in honour of Empress Leopoldina, the Austrian wife of Dom Pedro I. At that time, the governor of the state was the Viscount of São Leopoldo.

During the Farroupilha Revolution, the colony was divided between the imperialists led by Daniel Hillebrand and the revolutionaries led by Hermann von Salisch. At that time the colony supported Porto Alegre, then under siege, supplying the city with provisions transported by barges along the Rio dos Sinos.

Text: Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Read the full article on Wikipedia (in Portuguese)