Diamantino is a small town in Mato Grosso

Mato Grosso

Mato Grosso is one of the states of Brazil, the third largest in area, located in the western part of the country.Neighboring states are Rondônia, Amazonas, Pará, Tocantins, Goiás and Mato Grosso do Sul. It also borders Bolivia to the southwest...

 state in Brazil

Brazil

Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

. Its has a population of 18.580, and is near Diamantino river

Diamantino River

-References:*...

. It is 1837 feet above sea-level, and sits at the foot of the Mato Grosso plateau

Mato Grosso Plateau

The Mato Grosso Plateau is a plateau in central Brazil occupying most of the state of Mato Grosso. It contains mostly savannah and woodland. It is an ancient erosional plateau that extends from the border of Goiás state westward to the Serra dos Parecis, which lies near the Bolivian border. In the...

. Its history dates from 1730 as a gold

Gold

Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au and an atomic number of 79. Gold is a dense, soft, shiny, malleable and ductile metal. Pure gold has a bright yellow color and luster traditionally considered attractive, which it maintains without oxidizing in air or water. Chemically, gold is a...

 mining

Mining

Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the earth, from an ore body, vein or seam. The term also includes the removal of soil. Materials recovered by mining include base metals, precious metals, iron, uranium, coal, diamonds, limestone, oil shale, rock...

 settlement. In 1746, diamond

Diamond

In mineralogy, diamond is an allotrope of carbon, where the carbon atoms are arranged in a variation of the face-centered cubic crystal structure called a diamond lattice. Diamond is less stable than graphite, but the conversion rate from diamond to graphite is negligible at ambient conditions...

s were discovered, which made the town's population swell and prosper. The amount of diamonds was greatly overestimated, and the town population has gone into steady decline ever since. Ipecacuanha and vanilla

Vanilla

Vanilla is a flavoring derived from orchids of the genus Vanilla, primarily from the Mexican species, Flat-leaved Vanilla . The word vanilla derives from the Spanish word "", little pod...

 beans grown and exported presently.

Near the city is the South American pole of inaccessibility, which means that no place in South America is as far from the nearest ocean as this point. The closest ocean is the Pacific Ocean

Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean is the largest of the Earth's oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south, bounded by Asia and Australia in the west, and the Americas in the east.At 165.2 million square kilometres in area, this largest division of the World...

, at the Peruvian-Chilean border.