Cataguases is a municipality located in the southeastern part of the state of

Minas Gerais Minas Gerais () is a state in Southeastern Brazil. It ranks as the second most populous, the third by gross domestic product (GDP), and the fourth largest by area in the country. The state's capital and largest city, Belo Horizonte (literall ...

in Brazil. The estimated population in 2020 was 75,540. It is mainly an industrial centre (textile,

metallurgy Metallurgy is a domain of materials science and engineering that studies the physical and chemical behavior of metallic elements, their inter-metallic compounds, and their mixtures, which are known as alloys. Metallurgy encompasses both the sc ...

, clothes) with a strong influence of

coffee Coffee is a drink prepared from roasted coffee beans. Darkly colored, bitter, and slightly acidic, coffee has a stimulating effect on humans, primarily due to its caffeine content. It is the most popular hot drink in the world. Seeds of ...

plantation A plantation is an agricultural estate, generally centered on a plantation house, meant for farming that specializes in cash crops, usually mainly planted with a single crop, with perhaps ancillary areas for vegetables for eating and so on. Th ...

in its early history (19th century).

History

In the 1920s, the city was associated with the Brazilian cinema pioneer

Humberto Mauro Humberto Duarte Mauro (30 April 1897 – 5 November 1983) was a Brazilian film director. His best known work is '' Ganga Bruta''. He is often considered the greatest director of early Brazilian cinema. Career Mauro's second feature film ''Theso ...

and a generation of writers for the short-lived Revista Verde. Humberto Mauro shot there some films that earned him a good reputation nationwide. He later made ''Braza Dormida'' (''Sleeping Fire'') and ''O Descobrimento do Brasil'' (''The Finding of Brazil'') and was a reputed Tupi language scholar. Industrialisation changed the town significantly and caused some of its citizens to become very rich in the 1920s and 1930s. As a result the city centre was remodeled accordingly to the ultimate architecture styles. The architect

Oscar Niemeyer Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho (15 December 1907 – 5 December 2012), known as Oscar Niemeyer (), was a Brazilian architect considered to be one of the key figures in the development of modern architecture. Niemeyer was ...

and painters Cândido Portinari, Djanira and Emeric Marcier are some of the Brazilian artists who left contributions there at that time. After three decades of wealth, the town lost its prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. The economic crisis and the changes due to the modernisation of the industries provoked high unemployment rates and depreciation of salaries, reducing the town's wealth. In 2003 the town was the site of an ecological accident caused by the spilling of chemical waste that affected the brook Cágado and the rivers Pomba and

Paraíba do Sul The Paraíba do Sul (), or simply termed Paraíba, is a river in southeast Brazil. It flows west to northeast from its farthest source at the source of the river Paraitinga to the sea near Campos dos Goytacazes. The river receives its name whe ...

, threatening the water supply of more than 20,000,000 Brazilians (including the state of

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro ( , , ; literally 'River of January'), or simply Rio, is the capital of the state of the same name, Brazil's third-most populous state, and the second-most populous city in Brazil, after São Paulo. Listed by the GaWC as a b ...

Climate

Cataguases experiences a

tropical savanna climate Tropical savanna climate or tropical wet and dry climate is a tropical climate sub-type that corresponds to the Köppen climate classification categories ''Aw'' (for a dry winter) and ''As'' (for a dry summer). The driest month has less than of ...

(Aw under

Köppen climate classification The Köppen climate classification is one of the most widely used climate classification systems. It was first published by German-Russian climatologist Wladimir Köppen (1846–1940) in 1884, with several later modifications by Köppen, nota ...

). Temperatures are high (above 18 °C (64.4 °F)) all over the year, and low temperatures lasting for a whole day are rare, and generally only occur in the

dry season The dry season is a yearly period of low rainfall, especially in the tropics. The weather in the tropics is dominated by the tropical rain belt, which moves from the northern to the southern tropics and back over the course of the year. The ...

. The

wet season The wet season (sometimes called the Rainy season) is the time of year when most of a region's average annual rainfall occurs. It is the time of year where the majority of a country's or region's annual precipitation occurs. Generally, the sea ...

starts in September and goes until May, while the dry season goes from May to September. Floods are not uncommon in the town, and generally there is one per year, in December, January or February. On the other side, during the dry season Rio Pomba has considerably less water than in other periods, and some people have

respiratory disease Respiratory diseases, or lung diseases, are pathological conditions affecting the organs and tissues that make gas exchange difficult in air-breathing animals. They include conditions of the respiratory tract including the trachea, bronchi, bro ...

s related to low air humidity.

Temperatures

References

Municipalities in Minas Gerais {{MinasGerais-geo-stub