According to the Tordesilhas Treaty (signed on June 7, 1494), the region where Mato Grosso is now, formerly belonged to Spain, but Spain and Portugal received new borders as a result of two conventions, Madrid (1750) and Santo Ildefonso (1777).
The name of the State came with 18th Century explorers who first saw the thick woods [mato grosso], upon arrival.
In 1977, part of the State was separated, to form the State of Mato Grosso do Sul [South Mato Grosso], with a 903,357.908 Km² area. The State of Mato Grosso is in Midwest Brazil, bordering the states of Amazonas, Goiás, Mato Grosso do Sul, Pará and Rondônia, besides the Republic of Bolivia.
The predominant vegetation in the state is the same of the Amazon Forest, throughout about 47% of the area, further to the corral ["cerrados"] and fields of Pantanal Mato-Grossense [Mato Grosso Swamp], which separates the waters of Paraguay River from those of the Amazon River.
Pantanal is an ecosystem in a 140 mil km² area inside Brazil, comprising 12 cities in Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul, being also located in Bolivia and Paraguay, which was included by UNESCO in the World Heritage List for natural values and Biosphere Reserve, for being one of the most exuberant and diversified natural reserves in Earth, where a rare beauty and abundant fauna and flora exist.
On a 33 thousand hectares of area belonging to the cities of Cuiabá, state capital, and Chapada dos Guimarães, there is the "National Park of Chapada dos Guimarães", with huge sandstone rocky mountains and many waterfalls. The park also shelters dozens of archaeological sites with Palaeolithic cave paintings and fossils of prehistoric animal.
For being exactly in the centre of South America, Chapada dos Guimarães is considered a Geodesic Centre, which would be a point equally distant between the Atlantic and the Pacific, a spot which uses to attract mystic and sensitive people from everywhere in the world.
