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What are cities in Brazil?
Although everyone agrees that a city is an urban area, the definition of city varies a lot from country to country and sometimes from state to state in one same country. The definition of city, town, province, village intersect to each other and sometimes antagonic concepts arise from that.
From a semantical stand point, general understanding in Brazil mixes the concept of city and town, but not village. From a practical stand point the terms city and town are replaced by the term municipal district (municipio) , which in Brazil, is the smallest political administrative unit, with only two powers, the Executive headed by a Mayor and the Legislative by town councillors. The number of town councillors varies from 9 to 55 depending upon the population´s size. Cities in Brazil have no Judiciary Power, which exists only at state and federal levels. Villages do not have any of the three powers; they have at most, a regional administrative office that reports to City Hall. Province is a State, pretty much as a State in the US.
Brazil is officialy divided into 5 regions: north (N), northeast (NE), southeast (SE), south (S) and central west (CW). It has 26 states and one federal district, Brasilia, which is the country´s capital, a city and a state at the same time, located in central west region.
The list of the sates (abbreviature) and the region they are:
1 Acre (AC) N 2 Alagoas (AL) NE 3 Amapá (AP) N 4 Amazonas (AM) N 5 Bahia (BA) NE 6 Ceará (CE) NE 7 Espírito Santo (ES) SE 8 Goiás (GO) CW 9 Maranhão (MA) NE 10 Mato Grosso (MT) CW 11 Mato Grosso do Sul (MS) CW 12 Minas Gerais (MG) SE 13 Pará (PA) N 14 Paraíba (PB) NE 15 Paraná (PR) S 16 Pernambuco (PE) NE 17 Piauí (PI) NE 18 Rio de Janeiro (RJ) SE 19 Rio Grande do Norte (RN) NE 20 Rio Grande do Sul (RS) S 21 Rondônia (RO) N 22 Roraima (RR) N 23 Santa Catarina (SC) S 24 São Paulo (SP) SE 25 Sergipe (SE) NE 26 Tocantins TO) N
There are over 5 560 cities (municipal districts) with the following extremes:
Smallest municipal district: Santa Cruz de Minas with 2.9 square kilometers, or 1.1 square miles and a population smaller than 10 thousand people (2005) is in the State of Minas Gerais.
Largest municipal district: Altamira with 161 445.9 sq km, or 62 334.6 sq mi, it is almost twice the size of Portugal and has a population of around 85 thousand people (2005).
Smallest population: City of Bora with 818 people (2004) with 118.7 sq km (45.8 sq mi) in the State of Sao Paulo.
Largest population: City of Sao Paulo with 10 886 518 people (2007) in an area of 1524 sq km (588 sq mi) is the capital of the State of Sao Paulo. The metropolitan area of the Great Sao Paulo has a population of 19 949 261 people (2007).