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Novo Hamburgo is a city in the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. Its population is 250,800 (2005). The city covers an area of 217 square kilometers, and the average temperature is 19ºC, a mild one for the region. The Sinos River (Rio dos Sinos) runs through it. The city is the industrial center of the Sinos River Valley, the economy of which is based mainly on the manufacture of shoes and the associated leather goods supply chain. It is considered a rich city by Brazilian standards, although it has some impoverished areas.
The area of the city was first settled by Portuguese immigrants in the mid 18th century, but it would grow to the status of village only with the arrival of the first German immigrants in 1824. At that time, Novo Hamburgo was part of São Leopoldo, the cradle of German immigration in Brazil. The Germans established a prosperous agricultural colony and eventually started to supply the state's main urban centers at that time with food.
Some of the immigrants also brought handicraft skills, valuable for a self-sufficient, isolated economy, as the valley and the state were at that time. In Novo Hamburgo, the first urban agglomeration appeared around the Hamburger Berg, circa 1870, where there was a little commerce. The city was emancipated from São Leopoldo on April 5, 1927, and soon joined the rest of Brazil in its run to industrialization.
Those immigrant German craftsmen eventually started to manufacture shoes and machinery on a large scale and in the 1960s began to export goods, a process that transformed the city into a magnet for internal immigrants from impoverished areas around the state and the country. Today's Novo Hamburgo depends heavily upon shoe exports, although it diversified its industrial and commercial base in the early 1990s.
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