Through wars against the French, the Portuguese slowly expanded their territory to the southeast, taking Rio de Janeiro in 1567, and to the northwest, taking São Luís in 1615.[35] They sent military expeditions to the Amazon rainforest and conquered British and Dutch strongholds,[36] founding villages and forts from 1669.[37] In 1680 they reached the far south and founded Sacramento on the bank of the Rio de la Plata, in the Eastern Strip region (present-day Uruguay).[38]
At the end of the 17th century, sugar exports started to decline[39] but beginning in the 1690s, the discovery of gold by explorers in the region that would later be called Minas Gerais (General Mines) in current Mato Grosso and Goiás, saved the colony from imminent collapse.[40] From all over Brazil, as well as from Portugal, thousands of immigrants came to the mines.[41]
The Spanish tried to prevent Portuguese expansion into the territory that belonged to them according to the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, and succeeded in conquering the Eastern Strip in 1777. However, this was in vain as the Treaty of San Ildefonso, signed in the same year, confirmed Portuguese sovereignty over all lands proceeding from its territorial expansion, thus creating most of the current Brazilian borders.[42]
In 1808, the Portuguese royal family and the majority of the Portuguese nobility, fleeing the troops of the French Emperor Napoleon I that were invading Portugal and most of Central Europe, established themselves in the city of Rio de Janeiro, which thus became the seat of the entire Portuguese Empire.[43] In 1815 Dom João VI, then regent on behalf of his incapacitated mother, elevated Brazil from colony to sovereign Kingdom united with Portugal.[43] In 1809 the Portuguese invaded French Guiana (which was returned to France in 1817)[44] and in 1816 the Eastern Strip, subsequently renamed Cisplatina.[45]
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