Piauí
state in the Northeast Region of Brazil
Piauí (, pyow-EE; pronounced [pi.aˈwi] or [pjaˈwi] ) is one of the states of Brazil, located in the country's Northeast Region. The state has 1.6% of the Brazilian population and produces 0.7% of the Brazilian GDP.
Piauí has the shortest coastline of any coastal Brazilian state at 66 km (41 mi), and the capital, Teresina, is the only state capital in the northeast to be located inland. Unlike the rest of the area, Piauí was first colonised inland and slowly expanded towards the ocean, rather than the other way around. In the southeast of the state, the National Park of Serra da Capivara is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The park has more than 400 archaeological sites and the largest concentration of rock paintings in the world, in a landscape dominated by canyons and caatinga.
History
The state has many notable archaeological sites, including Serra de Capivara National Park and Sete Cidades National Park, which are rich in remains of prehistoric Paleo-Indian and sedentary-based Indigenous Brazilian complex cultures.
Early settlers in the region included Francisco Dias d'Ávila from state of Bahia, who brought the first herds of cattle to the area; and Domingos Afonso Mafrense, from Portugal, who founded what is today Oeiras.
In the 17th century, many impoverished noblemen and Jesuit priests, as well as black and Amerindian slaves, settled there. The first large-scale cattle farming also arrived with these settlers. Large estate owners seeking new pastures for their livestock arrived from neighbouring states such as Bahia and Maranhão.
The public source identifies “Piauí” as state in the Northeast Region of Brazil. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Piauí, state and Northeast.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q42722. VIAF identifies the subject as 143054038. The Library of Congress control number is n79064830. Authority coordinates are -7.417, -42.900. 3 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Piauí” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.