It is the second-largest state of Brazil in area, at 1.2 million square kilometres (460,000 sq mi), second only to Amazonas upriver.

Every October, Belém receives tens of thousands of tourists for the year's most important religious celebration: the procession of the Círio de Nazaré.

Another important attraction of the capital is the Marajó-style ceramics, based on the vanished Marajoara culture, which developed on that very large island in the Amazon River.

The state's name is a toponym of the Tupi word pará – literally "sea", but sometimes used to refer to large rivers.

[8] Archaeologists divide the ancient inhabitants of prehistory Brazil into groups according to their way of life and tools: hunter-gatherers of the coast and farmers.

These people knew ceramics, dyes, natural medicinal compounds; practiced slash-and-burn (to clear the land); and planted cassava.

The region of the Amazon valley, by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), was in possession of the Spanish Crown, the Portuguese expeditionaries, with the purpose of consolidating the region as Portuguese territory, founded the Fort of the Nativity (Forte do Presépio) in 1616, in Santa Maria de Belém do Grão-Pará (Saint Mary of Bethlehem of the Great Pará).

Despite the construction of fort, the occupation of territory was marked by early Dutch and English incursions in search of spices, hence the need of the Portuguese to fortify the area.

In 1823, the Pará decided to join the independent Brazil, which had been separated during the colonial period, reporting directly to Lisbon.

Cabanagem, a popular and social revolt during the Empire of Brazil, in the Amazon region, was influenced by the French Revolution.

It was mainly due to extreme poverty, hunger and disease that devastated the Amazon at the beginning of the period, in the former province of Grão-Pará, which included the current Amazonian states of Pará, Amazonas, Amapá, Roraima and Rondônia.

After independence, the strong Portuguese influence remained stable, giving political irrelevance in this province to the Brazilian central government.

[9] At the bottom of the rebellion, there was a mobilization of the Brazilian Empire against the reactionary forces of the province of Grão-Pará in expelling the insurgents who wanted to keep the region as a Portuguese colony or territory independent.

During this period, for example, the city center was heavily lined with mango trees transported from India and development inspired by the model of Paris.

With the decline of the two cycles of rubber (1870–1920 and 1940–1945),[10] came a distressing economic stagnation, which stopped in the 1960s and 1970s,[11] with the development of agricultural activities in the south of the state.

The Portuguese colonists were followed by Spaniards fleeing wars and social unrest due to political disputes in the Iberian Peninsula.

In January 1616, the Portuguese captain, Francisco Caldeira Castelo Branco began the occupation of the land, founding the Fort of the Nativity, nucleus of the future state capital.

The first Japanese immigrants who settled in the Amazon left the Port of Kobe in Japan, on July 24, 1926, and reached the city of Tomé-Açu, on 22 September of that year, with stops in Rio de Janeiro and Belém.

The third largest ethnic Japanese community in Brazil is in Pará, with about 13,000 inhabitants (surpassed only by settlements in the states of São Paulo and Paraná).

The presence in western Pará was so pronounced that the Consulate of Italy established an office in Óbidos, which is the largest city populated by Italians in the state.

In Pará, the Lebanese settled in Belém, and in the cities of Cametá, Marabá, Altamira, Breves, Monte Alegre, Alenquer, Santarém, Óbidos, Soure, Maracanã, Abaetetuba, among others.

The first French immigrants arrived in Brazil in the second half of the 19th century, settling in the colony of Benevides, the metropolitan region of Belém do Pará.

Guaraná, a tree from which a powder is produced and used as a stimulant, and annatto seeds, a fruit used for cooking, as a sunscreen and for dye extraction.

The complex produced 296 million metric tons of iron ore in 2007,[19] exporting the product to many countries, among them Japan, Germany, Italy, France and Spain.

Floresta do Araguaia also has the largest concentrated fruit juice industry in Brazil, exporting to European Union, United States and Mercosur.

In manganese, Pará produced a large part of Brazilian production (2.3 of 3.4 million tons) at a value of R$1 billion.

[33] Due to the proximity of the iron ore mines, Siderúrgica Norte Brasil (Sinobras) was created in Marabá.

Currently it serves demand of 2.7 million passengers a year, in a constructed area of 33,255.17 square meters (357,955.7 sq ft).

[36] The Port of Belém has restaurants, art galleries, a small brewery, ice-cream shops, artisan stands, regional food kiosks, coffee houses, a space for fairs and events, a theatre for 400 spectators, and a touristic harbour.

His final diagnosis is selenium poisoning from eating "castanhas-do-Pará," literally "chestnuts of Pará" in Brazilian Portuguese, aka Brazil nuts.