'"Great Field"') is a city in the central and western region of Brazil, capital of the state of Mato Grosso do Sul.

Historically a stronghold of separatists from the North and South, founded by José Antônio Pereira, the city is planned in the middle of a vast green space, with wide streets and tree-lined avenues with several gardens along the way.

[2] The region where the city is located was in the past a waypoint for travellers who wanted to go from São Paulo or Minas Gerais to northern Mato Grosso by land.

In the early 1900s, a railway was completed, connecting Campo Grande to Corumbá on the Bolivian border and to Bauru, São Paulo.

Also in the beginning of the 20th century, the Western Brazilian Army Headquarters was established in Campo Grande, making it an important military center.

Today, the city has its own culture, which is a mixture of several ethnic groups, most notably immigrants from the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa,[3] Middle Easterners,[4] Armenians,[5] Portuguese people, Germans, Italians, Spaniards, and Paraguayans,[5] finally mixed with Asian and European Brazilians from the Brazilian Southern and Southeast regions, its native Amerindian peoples and Afro-Brazilians.

Campo Grande started as a small village founded in 1877 by farmers José Antônio Pereira and Manoel Vieira de Sousa (a.k.a.

In 1930, the city was the theater of a small conflict involving governmental forces, led by Getulio Vargas, and indigenous groups.

The vegetation in Campo Grande and Central Brazil is a tropical savanna called "Cerrado" that varies from pure grassland to a nearly closed canopy of medium height trees overlying grass.

The municipality contains the 178 hectares (440 acres) Matas do Segredo State Park, created in 2000 to protect an area of cerrado forest.

[8][9] Its altitude a few hundred meters higher than in the surrounding swamps and its location in the interior of South America, gives a much more extreme climate than several Brazilian cities, although still moderate.

The farming of bovine livestock supplies local slaughterhouses, which in turn allows Campo Grande to export meat to other states in Brazil and abroad.

BR-262 links Campo Grande to Corumbá and Bolivia to the west, and the Brazilian State of São Paulo to the east.

BR-163 connects Campo Grande to Cuiabá and the Amazon region to the north, and to Dourados (which is 120 kilometres (75 miles) from the Paraguayan border) to the south.

[citation needed] Festas Juninas were introduced to Northeastern Brazil by the Portuguese and the custom spread to the rest of the country, including Campo-Grande, where festivities take place with the usual fare of typical foods and decoration, rural costumes, music, dancing, a bonfire, and fireworks.