Qualla: Presidente Prudente

Presidente Prudente: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Toni Oliv, CC BY-SA 4.0. The city is called Prudente because a lawyer named himself Prudente. Prudente de Morais was the first civilian president of Brazil and, before that, the first governor of the state of Sao Paulo in the early days of the republic. When a new town went up in the far western paulista frontier, they gave it his name. It stuck. A century later, the city that bears it calls itself the Capital of the West Paulista - the anchor city of a vast agricultural hinterland that stretches toward the border with Mato Grosso do Sul, cattle country on one side and soybean country on the other.

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Image: Toni Oliv | CC BY-SA 4.0

Presidente Prudente: Coffee Until 1929

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eduardo de Paulo Uliam, CC BY-SA 3.0. Prudente was built on coffee, like most of the interior of Sao Paulo state in the early twentieth century. Plantations advanced from the Atlantic coast westward as older soils exhausted, and Prudente emerged on the leading edge of that advance. Then came the 1929 stock market cra...

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Image: Eduardo de Paulo Uliam | CC BY-SA 3.0

Presidente Prudente: Carandiru's Echo

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anlu Rode, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2002, Brazil closed the Carandiru Prison in Sao Paulo city - the site of the 1992 massacre in which 111 inmates were killed during a police intervention. When Carandiru was dismantled, its population had to go somewhere, and much of it ended up in the string of high-security f...

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Image: Anlu Rode | CC BY-SA 4.0

Presidente Prudente: Three Ground Stations

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Decreto Estadual N. 34.244, de 17 de dezembro de 1958 - Cria o Brasão-de-Armas da Fôrça Pública e regulamenta o seu uso., Public domain. Prudente is one of only three cities in Brazil that serves as a ground station for the Globalstar satellite phone network. The other two are Manaus, in the Amazon, and Petrolina, in the arid Northeast. It is an odd distinction for a mid-sized interior city - those three nodes tog...

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Image: Decreto Estadual N. 34.244, de 17 de dezembro de 1958 - Cria o Brasão-de-Armas da Fôrça Pública e regulamenta o seu uso. | Public domain

Presidente Prudente: Rivers and Roads

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LFellipe, Public domain. The Parana River basin drains the city's landscape. Streams called Veado and Cedro feed into the Santo Anastacio River; the stream of Onca and the Mandaguari River feed into the Peixe River. The terrain is gently undulating, a landscape of hills with waterways between them, the t...

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Image: LFellipe | Public domain

Presidente Prudente: Sunset at the Border

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zekialves, CC BY-SA 3.0. The neighboring city of Presidente Epitacio, down the Raposo Tavares at the banks of the Parana River, is famous for what Brazilians have voted the most beautiful sunset in the country - a long flat horizon where the water carries the last of the light for miles. Prudente itself ...

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Image: Zekialves | CC BY-SA 3.0