Londrina, Terra Roxa (Red Soil)

As you already know (since lots of peers have said this before, including me!! Haha!), Londrina is named after London. It means “Little London” (lovely, isn’t it?) due to the weather, which used to be quite foggy… any resemblance to London? ;D
Unfortunately, it’s not that foggy any more. Believe it or not, I still remember those days when I opened the window and I had no clue if it was going to rain or not. Now, due to the global warming and greenhouse effects, everything’s changed, and it’s not different over it here.

Besides “Little London”, Londrina is also known as “Terra Roxa”. Thanks to the Italian immigrants, who used to say that our soil was extremely red, and red in Italian is Rosso, it was mistakenly adapted to Portuguese as Terra Roxa (Roxo in Portuguese means purple, not red). Even though, we still use this expression to refer to Londrina.

The fact is that Londrina is the 2nd biggest city in Paraná (our state in Brazil) and the 3rd in the Brazilian Southern. It was, is and will always be a beautiful city.

The city of Londrina has a unique history. 80 years ago Londrina did not even exist. In the 1920´s, The Brazilian Plantations, Ltd, in London, England, was developing the area which today is the northern part of our state, Paraná. That company from London, England, was building a railroad from São Paulo to the Brazilian frontier (Foz de Iguaçu, PR). On August 21, 1929, the surveying crew building the railroad arrived in the area known as Três Bocas (now in Londrina) and engineer Dr. Alexandre Razgulaeff put down the first marker. When the stock market crashed in 1929, construction on the railroad came to a screeching halt sometime there after. The city of Londrina sprang up where the tracks ended. Small farm plots were sold and people started streaming into the area.

Londrina is only 76 years old and at one time was the coffee capital of the world. From 1950 to 1970, Londrina grew a lot of coffee. In fact, in 1961, Londrina produced 51% of all the coffee of the world. Londrina used to produce Catuaí Coffee, one of the best kind of coffee. There are lots of places in Londrina named after this type of coffee.

Londrina is a cosmopolitan city I might say, since it was influenced not only by the English but also by the Italians, Japanese, Arabians, Germans and people from other areas in Brazil, such as Minas Gerais and São Paulo. You can notice this in the food as well as in the architecture. Come and visit Londrina. You will see what I mean.

Well, I guess this is it guys.

How about your city’s history?

Cheers!

Mary