This is The Guardian.

Not long after I'd first move to Brazil as the Guardian's Latin America correspondent,

fellow British journalist Dom Phillips invited me out for some drinks.

We'd both recently found ourselves in Rio de Janeiro.

It was one of those balmy Rio nights that are made for sipping Kaiparinias or ice-cold beers.

It was a welcome evening. I'd been struggling with Brazil's

slow-moving bureaucracy, how expensive the city was, and the language of my new home. Dom, on the

other hand, had been living for several years in Sao Paulo and was already under the skin of Brazil,

obsessed with its music and sports,

and he spoke excellent Portuguese.

It's a language that arrived a few hundred years before us,

with our European predecessors, as the English, Dutch, French, Spanish and Portuguese

battled it out to colonise the Americas.

The first to explore the length of the Amazon River was Spanish conquistador Francisco

G. Orelana in 1542 on the hunt for El Dorado.

He may not have found the hidden city of gold,

but according to the chronicles of Dominican friar Gasparji Carvajal,

the expedition did find sprawling cities connected by roads,

with built structures like monuments and fertile land.

When later colonizers arrived, it had all vanished.

Carval's reports were chalked up as tales invented to impress.

Instead, all Westerners found were small, isolated hunter-gatherer communities. People who they thought of as living in a wilderness deemed backward, less advanced, and savage. That's certainly a convenient

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