Santa Cruz, Rio de Janeiro

Santa Cruz
Neighborhood
Santa Cruz within Rio de Janeiro city;inset: within Rio de Janeiro state
Coordinates: 22°55′13″S 43°41′06″W / 22.92028°S 43.68500°W / -22.92028; -43.68500Coordinates: 22°55′13″S 43°41′06″W / 22.92028°S 43.68500°W / -22.92028; -43.68500
Country	Brazil
State	Rio de Janeiro (RJ)
Municipality/City	Rio de Janeiro
Zone	West Zone
Administrative Region	Santa Cruz
Area
• Total	12,504.43 ha (30,899.12 acres)
Population (2010)
• Total	217,333
• Density	1,700/km2 (4,500/sq mi)

Santa Cruz (Saint Cross) is an extensive and populous neighborhood of the high class, lower middle and low in the West Zone of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the farthest from the center of Rio de Janeiro. Cut by the Santa Cruz extension of the urban passenger rail network of the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro, it has a very diverse landscape, with commercial areas, residential and industrial.

It is the seat of the nineteenth Administrative Region (AR), comprising also the surrounding neighborhood of Paciência. The nineteenth-AR, in turn, belongs to the Planning Area 5 of the municipality of Rio de Janeiro and is subject to Subprefeitura da Zona Oeste.

Since the installation of Itaguaí Port, is a rapidly developing neighborhood. It is 445 years old, and has important preserved monuments. But it is a place of contrasts. It is one of the most populated districts, and at the same time, due to its vast land area, one of the least densely populated; has an industrial district, but in its landscape still rules many unexplored areas.

Its HDI in 2000 was 0.742, the 119 placed in the city of Rio de Janeiro, among 126 areas analyzed.

As stated in the rare work entitled History of the Imperial farm of Santa Cruz published by Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute, authored by Jose de Saldanha da Gama, who was one of the overseers of the farm in 1860, the Jesuits placed a large wooden cross, painted in black, seated on a stone base supported by a granite pillar. This cruise gave his name to Santa Cruz on December 30 of 1567.

Later, during the Empire, the cross was replaced by another of smaller dimensions and there is now a cross in the same place, but this is a replica built by the Brazilian Army .

Before the arrival of Europeans in America, the region known today as Santa Cruz was populated by people of the village's language family, Tupi–Guarani, who called the place of Spawning (fish too).

After the discovery of Brazil, with the arrival of Portuguese colonists to the Guanabara Bay, a vast area of lowlands of Santa Cruz and the surrounding mountains, was donated to Cristóvão Monteiro, the Captaincy of São Vicente by Martim Afonso de Sousa in January 1567, as a reward for services rendered during the military expedition that finally drove the French out of Guanabara. So he built shortly after a sugar mill and a chapel in a location known as Curral Falso, beginning the settlement of land by the Portuguese.