Montenegro is a city and municipality of the state of Rio Grande do Sul

Rio Grande do Sul

Rio Grande do Sul is the southernmost state in Brazil, and the state with the fifth highest Human Development Index in the country. In this state is located the southernmost city in the country, Chuí, on the border with Uruguay. In the region of Bento Gonçalves and Caxias do Sul, the largest wine...

, 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...

; 59.000 inhabitants.

The town was established in 1847 to be settled primarily by German immigrants from the Hundsrück region of southwest Germany. The local language was Riograndenser Hundsrückisch for most of its history and is still spoken there after 150 years of the initial settlement. Although today Portuguese

Portuguese language

Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

 prevails, mostly as a result of the campaign of the "Nacionalização" (Nationalization) forcefully imposed on all German and Italian settled areas of southern Brazil by president and dictator Getúlio Vargas

Getúlio Vargas

Getúlio Dornelles Vargas served as President of Brazil, first as dictator, from 1930 to 1945, and in a democratically elected term from 1951 until his suicide in 1954. Vargas led Brazil for 18 years, the most for any President, and second in Brazilian history to Emperor Pedro II...

 in the 1940s.

Cardinal

Cardinal (Catholicism)

A cardinal is a senior ecclesiastical official, usually an ordained bishop, and ecclesiastical prince of the Catholic Church. They are collectively known as the College of Cardinals, which as a body elects a new pope. The duties of the cardinals include attending the meetings of the College and...

 Cláudio Hummes

Cláudio Hummes

Cláudio Hummes, OFM is a Brazilian Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy in the Roman Curia , having previously served as Archbishop of Fortaleza from 1996 to 1998 and archbishop of São Paulo from 1998 to 2006...

, one of the candidates to the Catholic Church papacy in April 2005, was born in the area. On July 2, 2008, Pope Benedict XVI

Pope Benedict XVI

Benedict XVI is the 265th and current Pope, by virtue of his office of Bishop of Rome, the Sovereign of the Vatican City State and the leader of the Catholic Church as well as the other 22 sui iuris Eastern Catholic Churches in full communion with the Holy See...

 erected the new Roman Catholic Diocese of Montenegro

Roman Catholic Diocese of Montenegro

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Montenegro is a diocese located in the city of Montenegro in the Ecclesiastical province of Porto Alegre in Brazil.-History:The diocese was erected on July 2 of 2008, from a subdivision of the Archdiocese of Porto Alegre....

, making it a suffragan see in the province of the metropolitan archdiocese of Porto Alegre

Porto Alegre

Porto Alegre is the tenth most populous municipality in Brazil, with 1,409,939 inhabitants, and the centre of Brazil's fourth largest metropolitan area . It is also the capital city of the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. The city is the southernmost capital city of a Brazilian...

, from whose territory it was taken.