Diamantino is a
municipality
A municipality is usually a single administrative division having corporate status and powers of self-government or jurisdiction as granted by national and regional laws to which it is subordinate.
The term ''municipality'' may also mean the go ...
in
Mato Grosso state in
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
. It has a population of 22,178 and is near
Diamantino River. It is above sea-level, and sits at the foot of the
Mato Grosso plateau. Its history dates from 1730 as a
gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile me ...
mining
Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the Earth, usually from an ore body, lode, vein, seam, reef, or placer deposit. The exploitation of these deposits for raw material is based on the economic ...
settlement. In 1746,
diamond
Diamond is a solid form of the element carbon with its atoms arranged in a crystal structure called diamond cubic. Another solid form of carbon known as graphite is the chemically stable form of carbon at room temperature and pressure, ...
s were discovered, which made the town's population swell and prosper. The amount of diamonds was greatly overestimated, and the town population steadily declined.
Near the city is the
South American pole of inaccessibility, which means that no place in South America is as far from the nearest ocean as this point. The closest ocean is the
Pacific Ocean
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the contin ...
, at the Peruvian-Chilean border.
References
Municipalities in Mato Grosso
{{matoGrosso-geo-stub