Monte Alegre

Wedged on a hillside between fertile Amazon wetlands and cerrado (dry scrub forest), the Monte Alegre area has long been a preferred site for human habitation. In the hills behind the town, carbon dating of middens below cave paintings indicates a human presence as many as 11,000 years ago, making them some of the earliest known in the Americas. A small band of Irish and English settled here in the 1570s, about 40 years before the Portuguese arrived in Belém. The site later became a missionary outpost—called Gurupatuba—for area natives. In 1758 it was incorporated as a village.